


Prisoner Two

by goldilocked



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bill Cipher Whump, Bill's Bizarre Biology, Eventual Smut, Human Bill Cipher, M/M, Older Dipper Pines, Slow Burn, kind of, not exactly enemies to lovers, this isn't gonna be a fun time for him folks, unfriendly acquaintances to lovers??
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2020-10-06 16:49:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 57,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20510300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldilocked/pseuds/goldilocked
Summary: An escaped shapeshifter. A semi-maniacal dream demon. A summer no one will forget--that is, if the Enforcement Officers don't get to them first.Dipper Pines may be in over his head, but that won't stop him from trying to figure out what, exactly, the hell is going on.(or, the one where Bill's an interdimensional fugitive and Dipper's far too curious for his own good)





	1. Falling to Your Doom--Nature's Alarm Clock

**Author's Note:**

> i've had this idea in the works for a while now, and over the summer i finally got a chance to work on it. bon appetit!
> 
> [rating subject to change in later chapters]

_Greyness._

_Silence._

_Still air, unmoving even in memory. Silhouettes, frozen mid-flicker yet advancing, rigid claws reaching, grasping, digging into an eternity. And voila (all our viewers at home, we guarantee you’re not gonna want to miss this, don’t cut to commercial, John, don’t you look away—): Pain without sensation._

_The shadows reached. They grasped. They dug._

_And, all of a sudden, something _shifted.

_“—omething’s—don’t—”_

_“This isn’t—get—under control! —”_

_“—how do we—I can’t—”_

_“—tshitshitshitshitshitsh—”_

_“What’s—find the Ward—"_

_“— ‘s—up! HE’S WAKING UP!”_

* * *

The first thing Bill noticed was the _colour._

Everything was a brilliant, screaming blue, so bright it burned his retina. His gaze darted back and forth out of instinct, rather than any particular conscious desire, and yup, there it was, bold as brass and still really fucking painful: Everything.

He squeezed his eye shut against the glare and flailed, only for his inside edges to fold up on themselves. His limbs were _wrong, _somehow. Well—more wrong than limbs usually were. Too heavy. Too jointed. Too... tender?

He cracked his eye open—enough to peek at the wrongness, not enough to alert the big blue everything to his presence and invite a second searing attack—and saw beige. Meat tentacles? He flexed his hand, and the tentacles—no, _fingers, _that was what they were called—flexed with it. Something silver glinted on his wrist, winking in the sunlight. He swung his gaze over, and there was another shiny metal band, bright against his... skin?

Now that he realized it, his entire body—_huh, is that what this is? —_was covered in the stuff, like a lead blanket someone had wrapped around his form. It felt suffocating. Weighted. Flesh was so _unwieldy;_ he had no idea why meatsacks carried it around everywhere. It felt as though it were drawn inexorably downwards, dragging him with it.

He glanced down.

_Oh._

The second thing Bill noticed was that he was falling.

_Wrongness _was immediately replaced by vertigo. Wind whipped past his face-flesh. The sky was swallowed by a dusty brownish-green blur, which sharpened into ground: pine trees, grid-like roads, buildings like grey boxes. Getting closer.

The third thing Bill noticed was that he wasn’t trapped.

He only had milliseconds to appreciate this very excellent fact, though, because there was a _cssh, _and a sound like breaking glass, and a metallic tang in the back of his throat, and then Bill Cipher hit Gravity Malls Shopping Complex back-first, and the world behind his eye dissolved into static.

* * *

Dipper had a plan.

The plan was simple. Efficient, really. Streamlined for maximum ease and panache.

And it did _not _include getting lost in the mall.

“It’s heading west!” called Mabel.

“On it!” He spun in a random direction.

“No, _west! _I mean—Left! _Left, _Dipdop!” Mabel grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back around, frowning down at the phone—_Dipper’s _phone—in her hand. She gave the screen a few experimental taps, brow furrowed. “Actually, cancel that. According to this thingy, we’re apparently right on top of it.” Her nose wrinkled. “Make that _literally _on top of it. Ew. What app even is this?”

“Find My Friends,” Dipper answered absentmindedly, scanning the clothing racks for anything suspicious. He didn’t know _what, _exactly, he was looking for, but he hoped he’d know it when he saw it. “And yeah, these IOS updates have been getting really weird lately.”

Mabel sniffed, giving him a pointed look. “I wouldn’t know.”

Dipper sighed. “It’s only been, what, a few hours?” he said, at the same time that she said theatrically, “An eternity.”

He sighed again. “Look, we’ll get your phone back, but we have bigger problems. Maybe literally, by now.”

A pair of passing shoppers shot the two of them strange looks. Dipper offered up a weak smile in return.

The mall wasn’t a great place for this. It didn’t even make the top ten. On a sunny Saturday afternoon like today, it was loud, and crowded, and easy to get lost in, and _damn, _this thing was smarter than Dipper had thought. He was equal parts fascinated and frustrated. Though part of the frustration could just be the _loud _and _crowded _talking.

He and Mabel were currently in Nordstrom. Dipper hadn’t even known there _was _a Nordstrom in Gravity Falls—he wouldn’t have guessed there was anyone in the town careless enough with money to drop $300 on a shirt. Possibly the Northwests were the store’s sole funders. Possibly it had just sort of materialized one day. Possibly he’d put too much thought into this.

Either way—probably because of the prices, because $200 for _jeans? _Really? —though the rest of the mall was a bustling hub of activity, Nordstrom was practically empty, save for a few bored, frayed-looking employees. Small blessings, Dipper supposed.

In any case, the ring lighting was starting to get on his nerves. He also wasn’t a huge fan of people looking at him like he was crazy—although, admittedly, he was pretty used to it by now. “Let’s just check the whole store,” he said to Mabel, holding up a hand to cut her groan off short. “_Just to be safe. _We’ll know if it tries to leave, right?”

“Yyyyes,” she said, with a dubious glance towards Dipper’s phone. “Probably. I’m pretty sure. Like, 67% sure. Okay, I don’t actually know how Find My Friends works, but that sounds right.”

Dipper nodded, trying to mind-over-matter that into a joke. “Okay, so. We find this thing—”

“—we get my phone back, because seriously, my password is just Waddles’s birthday—oh, don’t look at me like that, I can’t help it if I’m naturally trusting—it’s probably _reading my texts right now_, Dipper—”

“—but, _most importantly, _we capture the dangerous shapeshifter and bring it back to Great-Uncle Ford.”

They held each other’s gaze and nodded. Then Dipper added, “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think it can read.”

They split up. In unspoken agreement, Mabel headed off towards the makeup aisle— “Why would a shapeshifter need makeup?” “Everyone deserves to feel beautiful, Dipper. It’s right up there in the Constitution. Also, the lipstick here tastes _really _good”—while Dipper took the men’s section.

He prowled through the aisles, side-eying the clothing suspiciously. As he passed pairs of gleaming white sneakers, occasionally poking them to make sure they weren’t alive, the hair on the back of Dipper’s neck prickled. He felt watched. Then again, he’d felt watched all day. Something about a creature that could take the form of anything it saw had a way of cultivating paranoia like nothing else. But still...

Dipper turned and caught an employee staring at him, her eyes narrowed. He narrowed his eyes back. He was just deciding whether she looked like a murderous supernatural creature or not when she pointed to the sign hanging above her station: NO LOITERING. In smaller words under that, it said: YES, THIS MEANS TEENAGERS.

_Oh. _He glanced at the rack across from him: formal wear. Good enough. He grabbed a dark, jacket-looking thing and slid it into his bag, trying to project the air of a normal shopper. _Don’t mind me, just... doing my weekend shopping. Which is something I definitely do. _He caught sight of the prices and winced. _I... can always put it back later. _

He rounded the corner of the aisle, holding his bag more carefully now, and came back into line of sight with Mabel. His sister was standing next to the changerooms, staring intently at a slim, sundress-wearing woman as the woman flipped through a rack of blouses. She was fairly nondescript: freckled, pale, maybe in her early thirties.

She had also been Dipper and Mabel’s third-grade teacher back in Piedmont.

Noticing Dipper noticing her noticing the woman, Mabel cut her gaze between the woman and him, widening her eyes significantly.

He quirked a brow. _Ms. Shapiro? Are you sure?_

Her eyes, if possible, got even wider. She surreptitiously angled the phone to show him the screen and mouthed something that looked like _Let’s get this sucker_. It may also have been _Shouldn’t have given me detention, huh, Ms. Shapiro?_

It _was _incredibly unlikely that their former teacher would have decided to up and move to Oregon at the precise time they were looking for an escaped shapeshifter. Dipper clutched his randomly-selected jacket and strode purposefully across the floor to the changerooms. Once he got closer, he could see that Mabel had been right: The woman/shifter was flicking through a clothing rack, but wasn’t paying attention to what it was doing, instead scanning the store, eyes never lingering on one spot too long.

Its gaze landed on him, and, despite himself, Dipper felt a shiver run down his spine. There was something flat and reptilian and markedly _inhuman _in that stare. At first, Dipper thought it was going to pass over him, but then its eyes snapped back to his face. Recognition stirred lethargically behind its features. 

It stiffened minutely and turned as though to leave, but there was Mabel, looking casual, but with a hard set to her shoulders that let Dipper know she was ready to try out some of the boxing moves Grunkle Stan had shown her, should this go south.

Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that (though Dipper knew from experience how well Mabel could land a right hook). The shifter was boxed in: Dipper on one side, Mabel on the other, a row of changerooms at its back. It seemed to realize this too late, lips curling in a snarl. Its eyes darted back and forth as they advanced. 

“It’s over,” Dipper told it, one hand resting on the failsafe containment device—a taser, $27.99 on Amazon—in his back pocket. He thanked his lucky stars, again, that the changerooms were empty. This would look astronomically bad to any innocent lookers-on: some armed teens cornering a poor, albeit possibly feral, woman. “You’re stuck in here with us.”

Mabel _pssh_ed. “More like _it’s _stuck in here with— Oh, phooey.” She wrinkled her nose, deflating. “C’mon, bro-bro, let _me _have the one-liner once in a—”

She broke off, jaw falling open, gaze fixed on something over Dipper’s shoulder. Instinctively, Dipper twisted around to see what it was.

He followed his sister’s gaze to a surly-looking ginger guy across the store. Mabel let out a strangled sound. “That’s _Brendon_,” she said, eyes never leaving his broad shoulders. “He’s in my English class.” Then, almost reverently: “He’s _failing _my English class.” As they watched, the guy leaned over to examine a price tag, and Mabel unfroze, darting for the nearest open stall.

“Hey!” Dipper straightened up, too surprised to say anything else.

“Really sorry, bro-bro!” said Mabel as she brushed past him and slammed the door shut behind her. “But our school’s only big enough for _one _weird twin.”

The shifter took the opening. It shoved past Dipper and towards the exit, outer skin distorting as it started wrapping a new identity around itself. In another few seconds, it would be completely unrecognizable. And Dipper would be back to square one.

He cast a last, pained look at Mabel’s stall door, then tipped his head back and groaned. He tore after the shifter.

“You can do it, bro-bro!” came Mabel’s muffled voice from behind him. “Tell it to keep its shifty hands off my phone!” Something clinked. “Ooh, bangles. Come to me, 80s!”

Dipper burst out of Nordstrom, glancing wildly at the crowd around him. No sundresses. He could’ve sworn he heard someone shout, but ignored it. He sprinted over to a balcony and gripped the guard rail, leaning out dangerously far to scan the first floor.

Gravity Falls’s most popular—and only—mall had two phases: Deserted, and Giving the Canned Sardine Industry a Run for Its Money. Right now, on a Saturday afternoon, it was shaping up to be a Sardine day. Skylights and full-length windows let in plenty of afternoon sunlight as people milled lazily across the tile floor. Light-hearted chatter drifted up to Dipper’s ears. If the shifter had done the sensible thing and gotten itself lost in the crowd, it would be almost impossible to spot. 

His gaze landed on a steadily-growing cluster of people around the central fountain. _Here’s hoping it’s not sensible._

He rushed to the nearest down escalator, taking the stairs at a jog. As he angled towards the commotion, his shoes crunched on a fine rain of... was that glass?

He slowed, tilting his head back and squinting up at the glass ceiling. Sure enough, one of the triangular panels had been knocked clean out, affording a clear window into the bright summer sky. A faint breeze drifted down from it, tickling his face.

His brow furrowed. Had the shifter somehow managed to do that? He seriously doubted so.

(God, he seriously _hoped _so. Otherwise he was in a whole new world of trouble.)

Dipper reached the edge of the crowd and set about weaving his way to the front, deftly dodging sharp elbows and recording phones. Murmurs went up from around him— _“Did you see—?” _and _“Suicide—” _and _“Poor boy”—_but he tuned them out. He made it most of the way to the front of the crowd and rose onto his tiptoes.

Someone was sprawled in the fountain, soaked to the bone. Cloudy water sputtered down around them from half-crushed copper pipes. It didn’t take a genius to guess _what_, exactly, had crushed them.

_Aha._

Though Dipper wasn’t entirely convinced of karma’s hold on the supernatural—he put up with far too much crap for that—this seemed too good to be anything else. _That’s what you get, _he thought, a curl of satisfaction unfolding in his chest as he watched the shifter try to lift itself up on one palm, slip, and fall backwards into the water with a resounding _splash. Being smug about this doesn’t make me a bad person, right? No. No, this is just the right of smugness for someone in my position. _

From what Dipper could see, the shifter had stolen a new body; a guy, by the looks of its silhouette. Probably a brother or cousin or boyfriend of someone in the crowd. As Ford had warned him numerous times, the shifter liked to do that—elicit sympathy by pretending to be loved one. (He still had nightmares about Wendy charging at him with a kitchen knife.)

Because the shapeshifter also happened to be freaking _psychic. _Say what you would about his Great-Uncle; when Ford studied a creature, he went all-out.

The shifter leaned forward, gingerly bracing its arms against the stone lip of the fountain, and attempted to push itself to its feet. Dipper snapped back to the present.

_Oh no, you don’t. _He pushed the rest of the way through the crowd and seized the shifter by the upper arm. It glanced up at Dipper sharply as he hauled it to its feet, but didn’t resist. Hopefully it had picked up on his having a weapon. Either that, or it was as anxious about causing a scene as him.

“_There _you are!” he said loudly, for the crowd’s benefit. Those phones were still recording, after all, and Ford would have a coronary if he wound up on the evening news. He steered the shifter away from the crowd, keeping a firm grip on its arm. “Where did you go? I thought I lost you in Nordstrom for _sure_.” His grip tightened. “You have to be careful in malls, plenty of weirdos doing... weirdo things.”

He let the stream of stilted chatter die out as they worked their way across the lobby. Dipper cast the shifter a furtive sidelong glance. Ugh. It was completely soaked. How had it even managed to _do _that in such a short amount of time?

He picked up the pace, all but dragging the shifter behind him. Its every step squelched unpleasantly. If Dipper didn’t know better, he’d say it was purposefully banging itself into things: signs, clothing racks, small groups of children. It also seemed to be having difficulty walking—every movement was stiff at best, spastic at worst. After a few minutes, he was supporting almost its entire weight.

Irritation made Dipper grit his teeth. The _pettiness_—it knew it had been caught, so it was trying to drag this out. Well, he wasn’t going to play its games any longer.

He marched the shifter over to an alcove behind a pillar near a rack of expensive-looking sunglasses—double-checked that it was out of view from the rest of the mall—and slammed it back against the pillar, elbow to its throat. It let out a startled grunt. “Okay, what are you playing at?” Dipper said, voice low, mindful of the shoppers a few feet away. “C’mon, I _know _you understand English.” He hesitated, then—because it couldn’t hurt to ask—added, “How did you get out?”

No response. Not that he’d really been expecting one, but still. Dipper sighed, closing his eyes. “Look, man, if I can’t figure out what happened, Ford _will, _and that’ll be... not fun. For anyone. I get that being stuck in a pod isn’t great either, but if you come clean now, maybe we can work something out.”

There was a beat of silence. Then a raspy, painful-sounding noise. Slowly, horribly, Dipper realized it was _laughing. _

His eyes snapped open.

For as long as he’d known the shifter—which, admittedly, had only been a few days —it had spoken in a stuffy British accent. It didn’t laugh, and when it did, it certainly didn’t sound like its vocal cords were wrapped in sandpaper.

That was _not _the shifter’s voice.

That meant...

_Did you see—? Suicide— Poor boy. _

Dipper felt the blood drain from his face.

“Oh god.” He stumbled back, releasing the shif— the _guy_, the totally innocent guy he’d just been pinning against a wall in a public setting. “Oh, _god. _I am so, so sorry. I thought you were something— I mean, some_one_ else—”

He thought of the broken glass—a fall from that height would more than kill someone—and the word _suicide _echoed accusingly in his mind again. Dipper buried his burning face in his hands. “Suicide,” he mumbled to himself. “I just kidnapped a suicide victim. And then I manhandled a suicide victim.” He hadn’t bothered to check for injuries, because _shapeshifter_, but now... He grimaced, thinking of the guy’s shuffling, awkward steps, and of broken bones stepped on again, and again, and again...

He reached for his phone, feeling queasy. “I should... I should call you an ambulance.”

“Eh, NO WORRIES!” the Guy said—or something close to it; his voice still sounded like he spent his free time screaming. Dipper’s gaze snapped up to his face to find that he was actually _grinning _at him, and oh no, his brain was completely scrambled, Dipper was so going to jail for this. “I should thank you—this has been the most interesting one in a veritable ETERNITY! ’Sides, you should see the other guy!”

He doubled over in more painful-sounding laughter. Dipper wondered, vaguely, if it would be impolite to ask him to stop, on the grounds that it was _freaking him the hell out._

“’Fraid it would be, Pine Tree! Social conventions are a BITCH AND A HALF!” the Guy chortled, straightening up. They made eye contact.

Then Dipper made an undignified shrieking noise in the back of his throat.

“Your _eyes_,” he said, eloquently.

The Guy reached up to feel the side of his face and heaved a dramatic sigh. “Sadly, no.” Then the grin was back, sharp and unnerving as before. “But hey, there’s always next form, next time! Isn’t that how the old song and dance goes?”

Dipper just had time to think, _I don’t think EMS is qualified to deal with this, _before there was a resounding _CRACK, _and the pillar between them fractured outward in a spray of faux marble chips.

Dipper flinched away from the impact, limbs tingling with adrenaline. _That’s a bullet, _said the unflappably logical part of his brain, the part that sounded disturbingly like Ford sometimes. _Someone is shooting at us._

The other, much larger part said: _ASPARAGUS. _He wasn’t sure why.

The Guy’s laugh started up again, loud and strident and more than a little hysterical.

There was a high-pitched whine from behind them, like the sound of a futuristic weapon recharging. Dipper turned around, slowly, and discovered that, yup, that was exactly what that was.

Several men in black body armour—at least, they looked like men; the bulky armour made it difficult to tell—stood behind them in loose formation. Each of them held a dusky pewter machine gun, the chinks in the barrel jacket glowing an eerie acid green. In their lowered visors, Dipper’s wide-eyed reflection stared back at him.

“Aww,” the Guy crooned, clasping his hands together. _Maybe he really _is _suicidal, _Dipper thought, shooting him a panicked look. “All this for me? You really know how to make a guy feel special!”

The heavily-armed men, blessedly, gave no indication of having heard him. Instead—much less blessedly—they turned to Dipper.

“Resident!” the man at the front barked, in a voice Dipper could only describe as _governmental. _With a start, he realized the man was talking to him. “You have the right to remain still. Do not attempt to flee. Refusal to comply will be met with prompt molecular inversion.”

On the one hand, Dipper really didn’t want his molecules inverted today, whatever that meant.

On the other, it appeared he was already running. Whoops.

Dipper wasn’t sure which of them had taken off first—him or the Guy. It didn’t really matter. One moment he was frozen in place; the next he was moving, easily passing the guy, grabbing his wrist, and yanking him along behind him, because he knew where this was going, and he had no designs of becoming the guy who brought a taser to a high-tech machine gun fight_._

“Hey!” Heavy boots thudded against the tile. “Cease and desist, civilian!”

The guy’s laughter cut off long enough for him to yell, “Don’t you DARE, Pine Tree!” He was barely keeping pace, tripping over his own legs every other step. Dipper poured on speed and threw himself sideways just in time to dodge a spray of bullets. One burned through the _O _of Forever 21’s sign and kept going, embedding itself in the far wall. Dipper glanced over his shoulder to see the drywall wavering and jumping, strobing from existence to nonexistence like a Disco-Lite version of Schrodinger’s cat.

Dipper’s sense of _normal _had become a bit skewed over the years, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t normal. By any definition of the word.

“Stop!” More bullets bit into the steel rafters overhead. One plowed into a nearby trash can, vaporizing it. Dipper caught a faint whiff of singed garbage as he tore past.

He skidded around a corner and burst out into the brightness of the mall parking lot. Out here, the sun beat down on everything, stiflingly hot. He raced across the searing tarmac, yanking the Guy after him, not slowing until he practically slammed into the side of his Honda. Fumbling with his keys, Dipper threw himself into the driver’s seat and chucked his backpack into the back seat. As the car stirred to life, the radio crackled on, and Taylor Swift’s voice joined the clamour.

_“—I go on too many dates, but I can’t make ‘em stay—"_

Out of the corner of his eye, Dipper was aware of the Guy practically collapsing into the passenger’s side. He hurriedly pulled out of the parking lot, narrowly missing rear-ending a Volkswagen.

They barrelled out onto the main road. Dipper’s pulse thrummed in his temples. In his left side mirror, he caught sight of sleek black cars gliding out of the parking lot—slower than he had. Deliberate. Like they didn’t have to rush.

He leaned on the gas pedal.

_“—But I keep cruising, can’t stop, won’t stop moving—"_

“Canyouturnthemusicdown,” Dipper said, all in one breath. He cranked the wheel and turned onto a side street, heading away from downtown.

The Guy, if he heard, gave no indication. Dipper glanced into the rear-view mirror to find him slumped back against his seat, a glazed look in his eye.

“I said— _Crap.” _Dipper yanked the wheel to the left, just barely swerving around a tipped-over recycling bin. _Well, _that _completely defeats the purpose of recycling._ Eyes still on the road, he felt blindly for the volume controls.

_“—And the hATERS GONNA HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE—” _Taylor’s voice hitched upwards a few dozen decibels as he twisted the knob the wrong way.

Dipper strongly suspected he shouted something incoherent. He mashed buttons at random with one hand, the other still on the wheel, hoping one of them would do something. 

_“—I SHAKE IT OFF, I SHAKE IT—” _He jabbed the radio dial and the music finally cut out. Dipper grimaced, head pounding with a mixture of adrenaline and noise.

At least he seemed to have lost the entourage. He waited several minutes with bated breath, taking turns at random, but the black cars didn’t make a reappearance. Finally, once enough time had elapsed for his pulse to stop hammering, Dipper let out a long breath and eased up on the gas—and allowed himself to get his first good look at the elephant in the room. Or rather, in the passenger seat of his 2011 Honda CR-V.

Blond and tan, the Guy looked like a male model—at least, until Dipper stared too long at his features. With an angular jawline, high cheekbones, and lean build, there was a certain underlying _sharpness _to the Guy that matched his grin.

Pinning down the Guy’s age was difficult, and made more so by the almost ageless quality about him. He might have been slightly older than Dipper—if pressed, Dipper would’ve placed him at twenty—but his clothing didn’t make matters easier. The Guy wore some sort of loose jumpsuit, tattered and soaked (though, strangely, still immaculately white) from the glass roof and his foray in the fountain. Emblazoned across the chest was a faded number, all but the last few digits obscured by the ripped material: **\--0002.**

Dipper could almost convince himself that he’d picked up a random suicidal escapee from a federal prison (and _wow, _he’d never pictured _that _looking like a good option)... except, looking at the Guy’s clothing, Dipper couldn’t help but notice that there were no corresponding injuries to the tears. Like the glass had sliced through the fabric, then... what? Stopped before the skin?

_Been _stopped?

It was, altogether, incredibly suspicious. And that was without mentioning his eyes.

Though only one of the Guy’s eyes was visible, the other hidden by his hair, it stood out on his otherwise-normal face like a headlight. Literally like a headlight; the sclera was a luminescent yellow Dipper had only ever seen before in neon tubes. Even in the relative brightness of the car, it seemed to glow, casting a stark light over the rest of the Guy’s features. The pupil, by contrast, was black and slitted, like that of a cat.

So. The Guy wasn’t human. Dipper gripped the steering wheel, sweat prickling his palms. That was fine. Dipper knew plenty of nice, non-maniacal nonhumans.

Granted, most of them weren’t chased by men with guns and prone to bouts of crazed laughter.

They also weren’t allowed in his car.

Some life seemed to be returning to the Guy; he was now sitting up straighter, with one palm held flat in front of him. As Dipper watched, he gingerly tapped it with the pointer finger of his other hand. A surprised, almost disbelieving, look flashed across his face when the finger and palm connected. He poked himself again, slightly more vigorously. Then again. And again.

Dipper seriously considered leaving him alone and finishing the drive in silence. Eventually, though, curiosity and the desire to stop the Guy from breaking his own finger won out. “So,” Dipper cut in. The Guy froze mid-jab. “Now that we’ve lost those guys, would you mind telling me _what the hell is going on_?”

The blond grinned at him. “SURE THING, kid! Just do me a solid: What’s the time?”

Dipper, who thought he had been prepared for every possible answer, was not prepared for this. “What?” he echoed dumbly. He flicked his turn signal on.

The Guy rolled his eye, looking impatient. “The _time. _Y’know, that ARBITRARY METRIC by which HUMANS AND SINGLE-CELLED ORGANISMS bind themselves! Clocks! Watches! THE SPECIOUS PRESENT! C’mon, I thought you mortals were ALL OVER that stuff!”

Dipper took a moment to sift through that, taking a right turn. He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Uh... 2:17 p.m.?”

“You sure?” The Guy sat forward, eye bright. Now that his gaze had cleared, losing some of that strange, dreamy fog, Dipper could feel the weight of his consideration like a physical thing. Sitting this close to him felt a bit like sitting next to an open furnace.

“Um.” Despite himself, Dipper double-checked. “Yes? Why? What does that have to do with anything? Who are those guys? Why were you in the mall?”

But he had the sense the Guy wasn’t hearing him. His face had split in a wide grin, narrowed eye(s?) focused on some distant vanishing point. He also appeared to be chewing on his own tongue.

Dipper frowned. Human or not, he’d just put his neck on the line for this guy—he thought he was entitled to some answers. “Hello? What’s going on? Who are you? Why—”

The Guy raised a hand, rolling his eye. “Yeesh, kid, cool it with the questions. Don’tcha know I’ve just had a _blame-absolving _experience?” He pressed his lips together, as though to stifle a snicker. “As for who I am...” He stuck out a hand. After a moment, Dipper hesitantly took one of his own hands off the steering wheel to shake it. “The name’s Bill Cipher! Pleased to meet ya, Pine Tree.”

Dipper’s brow furrowed. He swore that name—_Bill Cipher—_rang a bell, but the memory was there and gone in a flash. “That...” _Answers very few of my questions. _“...isn’t my name. I’m Dipper. Dipper Pines,” he added, then immediately wished he hadn’t.

Bill snorted. “That’s unfortunate.”

Dipper refused to take name-flack from a guy called _Bill. _“So, who were those guys, exactly?” he asked instead.

“Oh, I WOULDN’T WORRY ABOUT THEM,” said Bill dismissively, pressing his hand against the air-conditioning vents as though fascinated by the stream of cool air. “They aren’t after you.”

Dipper blinked; then it hit him, and he immediately felt stupid. _They aren’t after you. _“Wait,” he said, glancing over at Bill. “Am I— a _getaway driver_?”

Bill grinned at him. Well, it wasn’t like he _hadn’t _been grinning before—that unnerving smile seemed to be his resting expression. The grin just... intensified. “Nothing like hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth!” he said brightly, and kicked his feet up on the dashboard.

Dipper swatted his legs with one hand, the other resting firmly on the steering wheel. “Don’t do that.”

His limbs still tingled with residual adrenaline; his ears still throbbed from the loud music. Bill’s non-answers, added to the fact that he probably had some kind of alien criminal in his car, were decidedly _not _helping. He fought the urge to massage his temples, groaning. Why did Mabel always have to leave her music—

_Mabel. Oh my god. _He sat bolt upright in his seat. “We have to go back.”

“Wait, what?” For the first time, an expression other than glee shadowed Bill’s face: trepidation, with a glimmer of—was that genuine _fear? _Whatever it was, it was there and gone in an instant. “Slow down there, Pollyanna!” he said as Dipper started to make an illegal U-turn. “I said they weren’t AFTER you, not that they wouldn’t happily CHEW YOU UP AND SPIT YOU OUT!”

Dipper felt himself go a bit pale. “My _sister’s _back there!”

“Oh.” Bill waved his hand breezily. “Then they’re probably pescatarian. She’ll be FINE.” He cocked his head, considering, then turned to Dipper. “Your sister’s not a fish, right?” He cackled. “Oh, don’t look so glum, kid, I’m just kidding! She’s like you—some species of ANT, by the looks of it!”

“She’ll be— Do you even listen to yourself?” Dipper was aware his voice was creeping into hysterics, but he didn’t care. He held up a hand when Bill opened his mouth. “Don’t answer that. My sister is still in the mall, _where I left her, _with a bunch of armed men and women and a shapeshifter and _Brendon _and who knows what else!” He fixed his eyes determinedly on the road ahead. “So, yes, _we have to go back.”_

A hand closed on his wrist. Dipper glanced down, surprised, and met Bill’s unsettling eye. “Nice speech! Still idiotic,” the blond drawled, but something in his gaze had turned serious. “You gotta trust me on this, kid. No one cares about your sister.” Dipper flinched, but Bill continued, growing gleeful. “You, though? You’ve been spotted helping me, and that makes you Prime Suspect Number One.” He booped Dipper on the nose. “You should be flattered! It’s not everyday they take notice of a THIRD-DIMENSIONAL BEING like yourself.”

Dread, cold and shivery, was beginning to pool in Dipper’s stomach. He ignored it and took a shaky breath. “Let go of my arm before I cause a car crash,” he said, voice much steadier than he felt.

Bill, surprisingly, obliged. He settled back, folding his arms across his chest and looking supremely pleased with himself. “Besides,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “I’d hate to have to INCINERATE YOU and be seen driving this DUMP ON WHEELS!” He cackled and tugged at one of the buttons that raised and lowered the windows. It came free in his hand. He blinked at it, grinning. “Whoopsies.”

Dipper’s head swam. _Third-dimensional being. Incinerate. Whoopsies._

He was starting to get the feeling that, possibly, this had been a big mistake. Bigger than usual.

He took a deep breath and turned the car around. He didn’t want to—every instinct in his body was screaming at him to _help Mabel_—but it was starting to look like he no longer had a choice.

He carefully did _not _think of the taser ($27.99 on Amazon) in his back pocket. He did _not _think of it being fully charged.

He _definitely _did not think about how satisfying it would be to wipe that smug look off Bill’s face.

And, in the meantime, he drove.


	2. Mr. Taseman, Tase Me a Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> preemptive rating change, babey

“Whew. So this is casa de Pines!”

Dipper gritted his teeth and got out of the car, slamming the door behind him. Gravel crunched beneath his worn sneakers. Bill stood on the other side of the Honda, hands on his hips, examining the Mystery Shack like an appraiser determining its market value.

“I gotta say,” Bill went on, pacing forwards, mirth dancing in his eye, “I was expecting something slovenlier. But this is DOWNRIGHT RAMSHACKLE!” He paused, grin widening. “Get it? RamSHACKle? HAH! I’m here all night, folks!”

_Your _face _is downright ramshackle. _Dipper took a deep, calming breath that stubbornly refused to be either deep or calming.

Saying his nerves were fried would be an understatement. The drive over to the Shack had done to Dipper’s blood pressure what the Hindenburg had done to the reputation of the zeppelin industry—which was to say, no favours.

After leaving the mall—and the heavily-armed people—behind, Dipper had driven. _Driven, _sure, but not really gone anywhere. He hadn’t been sure where _to _go. The Shack? But what if the almost-definitely government guys followed him and rained down hell on his family? He wasn’t anxious to find out what would happen if Great-Uncle Ford got in a shoot-out with what looked like the villains from every B-list sci-fi movie ever.

A friend’s house? Same issue, but with a much more one-ended shoot-out. And besides, Dipper couldn’t really afford to lose any friends, especially to something as made-up-sounding as ‘molecular inversion.’

The arcade? He had seriously considered this option for about half a second, if only because he could trust Rumble McSkirmish to shout something encouraging like, ‘THREE TIMES IS TOO MANY, TWIG CHILD!’ as Dipper was horrifically murdered.

In the end, none of his options had sounded too hot. So, Dipper had done the wise thing, and decided not to decide—which had basically amounted to him driving aimlessly around the outskirts of town until he was confident the men would have lost interest.

It was a drive that, under any other circumstances, might have been nice—pleasant, even. Watching the sunset turn the forest to molten gold, discovering new paths, allowing himself to relax behind the wheel...

As it was, however, Dipper had had a passenger.

A very, _very _annoying passenger.

He’d wound up spending the trip in terse, one-ended silence as he gave curt answers—“Yes,” “No,” “Not legally”—to Bill’s seemingly endless slew of increasingly bizarre, often disturbing, questions; all the while holding back his own, less disturbing—but frankly still bizarre—inquiries. By the end of it, Bill had broken off four more pieces of car upholstery and Dipper had threatened to leave him by the side of the road at the mercy of Old Man McGucket no less than three times.

It had been, quite possibly, the longest six hours of Dipper’s life. And that was counting Mabel’s foray into DIY boardgames.

But even Bill’s preternaturally irritating chatter couldn’t completely stifle Dipper’s curiosity—or his paranoia. The blonde’s casual threat of incineration bounced around his head for the rest of the long, long car ride, so that, by the time they reached the Shack, Dipper was a tightly-wound mess of irritation and fear and unanswered questions.

Now the first stars were beginning to emerge in the pale evening sky. The fading light made sentinels of the pine trees, towering and dark in the corners of Dipper’s vision. A faint breeze rustled through their branches, bringing with it the scent of woodsmoke: someone starting a campfire. Summer was approaching fast.

“Well, WOULDYA LOOK THAT THAT!” Bill was peering up into the forest now, hands on his hips. “A Pine Tree living among pine trees—it’s your native habitat, kid!”

Dipper didn’t bother to dignify that with a response. Instead, he grabbed Bill’s arm, towing him along by his ridiculously-loose sleeve. “Just... come on.”

The lights in the Mystery Shack’s windows cast it in a warm glow as they headed up the driveway. A few feet before the porch, Dipper stopped and turned to Bill. “Okay. You wait off to the side here, and I’ll see if anyone’s home.”

Bill leaned closer, grinning. His breath was warm on Dipper’s collar. “What’s the matter, kid? Afraid to take me to meet the family?”

_Yes. _Dipper shoved him away, ears burning. “They’ll know you’re a nonhuman,” he pointed out. “Your eye is... seriously freaky.” Actually, in the twilight, its soft glow looked almost beautiful, but there was no way he was going to say that. “Plus, I don’t want my family to know I kidnapped someone.” _Or for them to be hunted by government agents._

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that!” said Bill cheerfully. “If anyone’s being kidnapped in this situation, it’s NOT ME!”

Dipper, unsure of what to say, said nothing. Bad move.

“So, we’re in agreement! GREAT!” Bill pushed past him, heading straight for the front door.

“Wait, no!” Dipper scrambled after him, a spark of panic igniting in his chest. _Maybe no one’s home, _he found himself hoping. _Maybe Grunkle Stan just left the lights on to run up the electricity bill and flaunt the fact that he doesn’t pay it. Maybe—_

As if on cue, the instant Bill stepped onto the first porch step, a shadow moved behind the curtains. Dipper froze as the silhouette moved over: out of the gift shop, sideways, towards—

Dipper sprung forward and shoved Bill into the bushes just before the door swung open. Bill let out a muffled yelp as he toppled over, but remained—thankfully—silent, the shrubbery lit from within like a paper lantern by the amber glow of his eye. It was far from perfect camouflage, but there was nothing Dipper could do now. It would have to suffice.

Someone stood in the doorway, backlit by the electric lighting spilling out across the porch. Dipper squinted; that didn’t look like one of the Stans. Actually, it kind of resembled—

“Surprise!” said Mabel’s silhouette, flinging her hands out at her sides. “A wild sister approaches.”

“Mabel?” Dipper blinked. “Mabel!” He let out a whooshing sigh, a knot of tension he’d almost forgotten about unravelling in his stomach. “Oh man, you have no _idea _how glad I am that you—”

“Got home?” She stepped forwards, letting the door swing shut behind her, and uh-oh, judging from that unimpressed look, he was _definitely _going to pay for his vanishing act later. “Yeah, well, you know what they say: Getting ditched by your brother is the mother of invention.”

He winced at the word _ditched_, rubbing the back of his neck. “Ha ha. Um, yeah. I’m... really, really sorry about that.” _Even if you _did_ leave me to fight a freaking shapeshifter on my own, _added a rebellious corner of his mind_._ He paused. “How _did _you get home, anyways?”

Mabel seemed to freeze for a moment, a flicker of an alien expression ghosting across her face. Then the moment passed, and her expression cleared, and Dipper decided it must have been his frayed imagination playing tricks on him. “I met up with some friends,” she said breezily. “They gave me a ride home.”

“Really?” Dipper said, trying very hard not to look at the glowing bush off to his right. He could _feel_ Bill’s glare boring into the side of his face. He felt a sudden rush of gladness for the leaves separating the two of them.

Mabel shrugged. “Well, I mean, they technically weren’t my friends before today, but hey: Friends are just strangers waiting to happen!” Her brow furrowed. “I didn’t dang say that right, but you know what I meant.”

Today had been so strange, Dipper found himself unconcerned with the fact that his sister had apparently hitched a ride home with random strangers. “Well, it’s good to see you back,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Bill had made himself a peephole in the shrubbery—his luminous cat’s eye now glowered out of the bushes. Dipper tried to surreptitiously wave for him to _stop that right now._

Mabel turned back to him. Dipper stopped waving. “Don’t think you’re off the hook that easily,” she warned, but there was a playful twinkle in her eyes. “So... How did it go, bro-bro? With the... you know.” She made a show of glancing around, then leaned forwards and mouthed _shapeshifter._

Despite himself, Dipper felt his shoulders slump. “Zip. It got away from me in the mall.”

“Aw, cheer up, Dipdop!” She grinned at him. “The Mystery Twins’ll be back at it before that shifty shifter knows what hit it. And I bet Grunkle Ford won’t even be disappointed,” she added. “Even though we _diiiid _fail the one task he assigned us, possibly endangering innumerable innocents in the process.”

Dipper sighed. “Thanks, Mabel.”

“No problemo!” she said brightly. Then she hesitated, casting a look around her for real this time. “I don’t want to sound crazypants here, bro-bro, but... Did you see someone out here a minute ago? Wearing some kind of white bedsheet, maybe?”

Bill scoffed from the bushes. Dipper cleared his throat over it. “Um... nope! No bedsheets out here!” he said, then bit the inside of his cheek. Technically, he told himself, it wasn’t a lie. He offered her what he hoped was a winning smile. “No one out here except me.” Annnnd _there_ was the lie.

“Hmmm. Well, okay.” She shrugged. “If you see them, tell them that Summerween isn’t for another couple of months. Oh, and that if they want their costume bedazzled”—she pointed her thumb at her chest— “this girl’s got them covered. For a reasonable fee, too!”

Dipper smiled. “I will absolutely do that.”

There was an awkward beat. Somewhere off in the woods, an owl hooted.

Mabel broke the silence first. “So, are you... coming inside?” She gestured at the front door.

“Uh... no?” It came out like a question. “No,” Dipper repeated, more firmly. “It’s a gorgeous evening; I think I’ll stay out here a while longer. To... watch the evening.”

She gave him a searching look, then shrugged again. “Suit yourself, ya weirdo.” A moment later, the door swung closed behind her.

Dipper let out a long breath, turning to the bushes. “Phew. That was—”

“_Bedsheet?” _Bill exclaimed, fuming, appearing out of nowhere beside Dipper. “BEDSHEET!” He clenched his fists. “This jumpsuit is reserved for the most MIND-LIQUIFYINGLY AWFUL entities this side of the multiverse, and she calls it a _bedsheet_! I don’t even know what that IS!”

Dipper eyed the torn jumpsuit. It did, he thought privately, kind of look like a bedsheet. But he was marginally more worried by ‘mind-liquifyingly awful entities.’

“Come on, Bill,” he said, starting up the porch steps. “You can have a fashion crisis inside.”

“—NEVER thought she’d stop TALKING,” Bill continued as Dipper bundled him inside the Shack. “I mean SERIOUSLY, you meatsacks only get what, seventy years? Eighty? With the way she gabs, you’d think she has CENTURIES TO BURN! It’s—" He fell silent for a moment, tilting his head at Dipper. “Did you actually say ‘watch the evening’?”

“Maybe,” Dipper said mysteriously, shrugging his backpack off by the front door.

Bill snickered. “Good to know I’m not the only one you’re a smooth-talker with.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Dipper, cheeks flaming. When Bill opened his mouth again, he added, “No, seriously. There’s no point to this if someone hears you.” He slipped a hand into his back pocket.

“SO!” Bill paced forwards and clapped his hands, doing a slow survey of the gift shop. Even though he knew it was stupid, Dipper couldn’t help feeling self-conscious about the state he’d left the shop in this morning: shelves knocked askew; shattered snow globes lining the floor; a mop lying, abandoned, next to a haphazard slag heap of half-melted magnets. _I’ll clean it up tomorrow, _he mentally promised Stan. _As soon as I do... everything else._

Bill did a slow pivot, taking in the kitchen. “Time to see how the OTHER 7.7 BILLION live! Am I getting the grand tour or—"

Dipper tasered him.

* * *

Bill woke up for the second time in seven millennia with his face on a table.

“Ut app’ned?” he mumbled. His tongue felt as though it were full of angry, writhing bees. Actually, his entire body was sore—if he moved, he suspected his muscles would tear apart like wet tissue paper. Even his teeth ached.

It felt _wonderful._

“Dammit,” someone muttered from behind him, and Bill became aware of a tugging behind him, something rough on his wrists. “You really _do _heal at an accelerated rate.”

That voice... he knew it. Bill blinked; it felt like rubbing sandpaper over his eyeball. He blinked again.

The person stepped out from behind him, hands on their hips, and Bill stopped blinking long enough to stare up at them. “Pine Tree?”

Pine Tree, rudely, ignored him. Instead, he held out a coil of rope. “This,” he said unnecessarily, “is rope. I’ve tied your hands together with it. And then I tied that rope to the chair. And then I tied _that _rope to—” He broke off, shaking his head. “Never mind. The point is, you’re tied up.” He brandished the rope again. “So, don’t try to escape. I mean it, man.”

Bill mumbled something against the table. Pine Tree, maybe unconsciously, leaned closer to hear, brow furrowing.

“Kinky,” said Bill again.

Pine Tree recoiled, a flush starting at his collarbone, and Bill couldn’t help it: He started to laugh.

“What?” asked Pine Tree, growing, if anything, more unsettled, those brown eyes darting this way and that—like he expected the walls to sprout mouths and start planning mutiny. “Why are you laughing?”

Still chuckling, Bill attempted to sit up straight—not an easy feat with his hands bound behind him. He settled for a contorted, half hunched-over position. “You’re just so ADORABLE, Pine Tree! Pathetic, but adorable. Like a three-legged puppy with hyperhidrosis and DELUSIONS OF ACADEMIC GRANDEUR!”

He could practically _see _Pine Tree’s teeth grind in his skull—could actually, if he really wanted to. “I told you, that’s not my name.”

Bill levelled the kid with what he knew was an infuriatingly knowing look. “Neither’s Dipper. But hey, whatever helps you sleep at night, _Mason._”

Pine Tree’s eyes went comically wide. “How do you—I didn’t—when—” 

“’Buh-buh-but—I never—h-how—,’” Bill mocked, then snorted. “I’m the MASTER OF THE MIND, kid! The All-Seeing Eye!” He tapped his eye and winked—although it probably just looked like an extra-long blink, what with the other currently MIA. Alas, time couldn’t heal all wounds, apparently. What a ripoff. “Nothing escapes this peeper’s omnipresent watch!”

“So...” Pine Tree’s brow furrowed. “You _knew _I was going to taser you?”

Bill blinked. “Yes,” he said, without much conviction.

“Alright,” said Pine Tree dubiously, eyes still narrowed. Bill could see the gears whirring behind that suspicious gaze as the kid settled into the seat across from Bill, deliberately—Bill was pleased to notice—keeping the table between the two of them. “Then you know why I’ve tied you up to my kitchen table.”

Bill, through great force of will, managed not to immediately answer _Funtimes. _“Hmm,” he said instead, pretending to think as he drummed his fingertips on the table. He supressed a grin as he watched Pine Tree reflexively follow the gesture with his eyes. Void Eternal, but he’d _missed _this! “Let me see. Your PET CONTORTIONIST gone missing, your sister SUSPICIOUSLY EMPTY-HEADED, and then all of a sudden: BOOM! I appear in all my glory”—he ignored Pine Tree’s mutter of ‘define _glory_’— “pursued by a posse of WEAPON-BRANDISHING DIPSHITS! It’s enough to drive a guy to MADNESS! Or, in your case—and this is where I’d clap delightedly if I could; good work with these knots, by the way, very Boy Scouts of America—to TYING A STRANGER TO A TABLE!”

“Technically, you’re tied to the chair,” Pine Tree muttered, but his expression held enough ill-concealed trepidation for Bill to feel confident he’d hit the nail square on the head. “And... wait, ‘suspiciously empty-headed’?” He sat forward. “My sister is _not _empty-headed. And she’s always like that.”

Bill shrugged the best he could with his arms pulled behind him. “What is it the kids say these days? ‘SURE, JAN’?”

“Either way,” said Pine Tree, neatly winding up the spare rope and setting it on the table beside him, careful not to break eye contact with Bill, who cheerfully held his gaze, “it’s incredibly suspicious. I want answers.”

Bill chortled. “WHO DOESN’T?” He inclined his head, mock-apologetic. “But, see, here’s the thing: I have a price for knowledge. I guess you could say MY HANDS ARE TIED! But,” he said, drawing out the word and looking Pine Tree up and down, relishing the red spots that bloomed high on the brunet’s cheeks, “for you, kid, I’ll throw in some freebies.” At Pine Tree’s hesitance, he added, “I recommend you START SHOOTING, ’cause this is all you’re gonna get.”

_Unless, of course, _whispered one of the shivery voices at the back of his mind eagerly, _he wants to make a deal._

_Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, _Bill thought back, biting the inside of his cheek to hide a grin.

Though, apparently, not well enough. Pine Tree was still eyeing him with open wariness. Bill could see the internal struggle playing out on his face: Which was worse, a parlay with a demon—though, of course, Pine Tree had no way of knowing that—or the aching, omnipresent gap of _not knowing_?

Pine Tree, he predicted as he waited oh-so-patiently at the splintering kitchen table, would take his chances. Bill knew the kid’s type; they always did, in the end.

Finally, Pine Tree let out a gusting, self-sacrificing sigh. “Fine,” he said, visibly bracing himself, as if he expected Bill to punch him in the face instead of answer him. Or punch him in the face and then answer him. Or answer him through face-punch Morse code. “The first question’s an easy one.”

“I _love _the easy ones,” Bill said, eye glittering—then swallowed a laugh at Pine Tree’s alarmed look.

“Riiiiight,” said Pine Tree, soldiering onwards despite the distinctly unnerved expression that seemed to have taken up permanent residence on his face. He cleared his throat and folded his hands on the table in front of himself. “Are you an alien?”

Bill blinked, then barked a laugh. “Jeez, kid, no! I’M A BIT OFFENDED, frankly. Aliens are losers.”

Though he tried to hide it, Pine Tree wilted slightly. _He probably has a solar system on his ceiling, _Bill thought gleefully. “Okay. Then what, in no uncertain terms, _are _you?”

“You get right to the point, don’t you? Well, LUCKY FOR YOU, I happen to have THREE TO SPARE!” Bill paused, and glanced down at his meatsack, frowning. “Huh. Guess that doesn’t really work anymore.” Drat. Millions of years worth of triangle puns: down the porcelain throne. “But, to answer your question—_in no uncertain terms—_I am a demon.”

This was received with less fanfare than Bill had hoped for. Pine Tree sucked in a sharp breath, looking tense but not, Bill noted, terribly surprised. He begrudgingly found himself revising his mental picture of the kid. “A... demon-demon?”

“A DREAM DEMON, specifically.” Bill quirked an eyebrow. “But if what you’re asking is whether I’ve been sent to DRAG YOUR UNWORTHY SOUL THROUGH THE NINE CIRCLES OF HELL, then no. I’m not about that fire-and-brimstone jazz.”

“Okay. So, assuming I believe you, which I’m definitely not saying I do, you’re a demon—which exist, definitively, no overwhelming theological implications there—but you’re not here to...”

“FLAY THE SKIN OFF THE UNDESERVING,” Bill supplied helpfully.

“Right. That. Good to know. But then”—Pine Tree sat forward, eyes intent— “why _are_ you here?”

“COSMIC LUCK-OF-THE-DRAW!” Bill shrugged. “I escaped, I fell, I made your _lovely _acquaintance. Which really WORKS WONDERS FOR GROGGINESS—have you considered making your voice into an ALARM CLOCK?”

“Hang on.” Pine Tree was shaking his head as though to clear water from his ears, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Did you say _escaped?”_

“Oopsies. Did I forget to mention that?” Bill tried—and failed, judging from Pine Tree’s look—to look appropriately guilty. “HATE TO BREAK IT TO YA, kid, but I’m something of a JAILBIRD!”

Pine Tree swallowed. “A... jailbird? From where?” His gaze kept straying back to Bill’s eye, then tearing away, seemingly equal parts intrigued and wary.

Bill wrinkled his nose; even the thought of the name _(grey halls grey skies open your mouth a chorus of grey whys) _was enough to put a sour taste in his mouth. “_Zphrmr,” _he half-hissed, bound arms tensing behind him.

_Whew! TOTAL AND UNCONDITIONAL LOATHING sure packs a punch!_

“Z-Zphurmur?” Pine Tree repeated clumsily, pronouncing it in three distinct syllables: _zuh-fur-mur._

“GESUNDHEIT!” Seeing the brunet opening his mouth for another try, Bill added, “Don’t beat yourself up about it. FUNNY AS IT WOULD BE to listen to you butcher words for another three hours, we don’t have all night. Besides, it’s not meant for PEOPLE LIKE YOU to say.”

Pine Tree cocked his head. “‘People like me’?”

“Oh, y’know”—Bill momentarily forgot his current predicament and tried to roll his hand, only for the ropes to pull tight, digging satisfyingly into his wrists— “meatsacks. The unevolved rabble. BEINGS CONFINED TO A SINGLE DIMENSION.” He nodded at Pine Tree. “Like you!”

“A... single dimension,” Pine Tree said, expression carefully neutral. Then: “I see”—even though he clearly didn’t. “What, exactly, _is _Zp—Zph—the thing you said?”

“Not AT ALL fun at parties, let me tell you.” It came out flatter than Bill had intended; without warning, a cold weight had settled in his chest, a throbbing starting up in his skull in time to his pulse_. Bodies are so weird. _“And don’t get me STARTED on the Enforcement Officers! With sticks that far up their asses, it’s a wonder they have room for spines!”

Pine Tree had the look of someone who was watching puzzle pieces fall into place and not remotely liking the picture. “Enforcement Officers... the guys at the mall? Coming after you. After you escaped from... what, some kind of interdimensional holding facility?” Though he was still talking out loud, Bill had the feeling Pine Tree was speaking to himself. “Which would explain the jumpsuit... and the _guns... _and the ‘mind-liquifyingly awful’ comments...”

Bill raised an amused eyebrow. “That one really got to you, huh?”

Pine Tree ignored him, raking a hand through his hair. “Do you even know...? This is _serious, _Bill.” Abruptly, he stood up, chair scraping against the floor, and started pacing. “I’m harbouring a _criminal. _From an impossibly advanced organization—”

“I wouldn’t go _that _far,” Bill muttered, eye following Pine Tree as he reached the end of the kitchen and turned around. “I mean, _I _escaped.” He paused. “Then again, I am pretty great.”

“—in the house I share with the rest of my family, who are going to wake up and say, ‘Good morning, Dipper! You were out late last night. What were you doing?’ and then I’m going to have to say, ‘Oh, yeah, haha, that’s because I was helping a demon hide from the law of the multiverse!’ and then they’re going to say, ‘Wait, what?’ and then _I’m_ going to say, ‘Yup! And you’re all wanted as conspirators! Have a good one!’” Pine Tree stopped in place and sucked in a breath, face pale, eyes panicky. His shoulders appeared to be shaking ever so slightly.

“You’re not gonna freak out, are you?” said Bill, bored, from the table.

Pine Tree whirled on him. “_Freak out?” _He laughed, a hysterical, terror-edged sound. _Great Scott, _Bill thought sardonically, _I believe the boy’s lost it. _“Oh, that ship has sailed. We are _well beyond _that point. And I don’t even know why I’m telling you any of this, when you—” He froze, some degree of lucidity returning to his expression, and peered more closely at Bill. “Huh. You know, you never mentioned what you did to wind up there in the first place.”

Bill felt the smile slip off his face. The cold in his chest was spreading, chilling his ribs, frost crystals blooming outwards, coating his vocal cords so that when he said, “S’pose not,” it sounded stiff and tight, even to his own ears.

Pine Tree strode over to the table and leaned down, searching Bill’s face. For a single, irrational moment, Bill wondered if Pine Tree could see through his eye to the freezer burn overtaking his mind. Then he shoved the feeling aside. _You’re being stupid, _he told himself viciously, digging his nails into his palms. It helped, a little, so he did it again. _All of this? Is stupid._

Pine Tree was still staring at him with those dumb moon-eyes. Bill forced himself to meet his gaze. “What did you do?” Pine Tree asked, genuinely curious.

_Stupid, stupid, stupid. _Bill forced a laugh. “Annnd Question Time is over, kiddies. Thanks for coming out! BE SURE TO PICK UP OUR NO SKIN, NO BONES DISCOUNT on the way out!”

Pine Tree blinked quickly, thrown for a brief loop, then shook his head. “Wait, what? No.” He folded his arms across the back of the chair he was standing behind. “No, that’s not how this works. This is an interrogation. You have to answer my questions.”

Bill narrowed his eye. _‘Have to’? _The kid was getting awfully uppity.

Time to fix that.

He straightened his back, ignoring the protests of his shoulders. “I don’t _have _to do anything,” he said quietly, dangerously. Pine Tree’s eyes widened, realizing his mistake, but it was too late now, Bill was on a roll. “Just sitting here LETTING YOU BABBLE AT ME is a favour. You’re lucky I don’t REVERSE YOUR INFERIOR GENETIC CODE and do the rest of your PATHETIC SPECIES a courtesy!” He sneered up at Pine Tree. “_Nothing _tells me what to do. Not the ARBITRARY RULEMAKERS OF THIS UNIVERSE, not some SNOTTY-NOSED HUMAN TEENAGER, and ESPECIALLY NOT someone STUPID enough to delude himself into THINKING THAT HE COULD!”

He took a deep breath, and on his next inhale, he _twisted._

And ignited.

Instantaneously, flames danced up his arms, blue and warm and familiar as his own mind, and his concern immediately burnt up with them: _Of course we’re still here, _the curls of fire seemed to whisper, snapping and crackling in a non-existent breeze, _of course we’re with you, of course of course of course. _The ropes—so thin, so laughable, _really, Pine Tree, I’m almost offended _–charred to nothing as licks of flame raced up and down Bill’s body like he’d been doused in kerosene. Pine Tree stumbled back from the table, horrified, tripping over his own feet in his animal haste to put some distance between himself and the supernatural bonfire sucking the oxygen from his kitchen.

As Pine Tree fell, Bill stood in one fluid motion—_equivalent exchange, _thought a small part of him approvingly, _the stuff dreams are made of—_the air around him distorting with heat. Bill grinned down at Pine Tree, mouth a white-hot chasm. “**OH, DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP**,” he said, voice like the roar of a forest fire, brushing off the ashes of the rope in front of Pine Tree’s dinner-plate-sized eyes. “**IT’S NOT YOU, BABY, IT’S YOUR HOPELESSLY LIMITED WORLDVIEW.”**

Bill winked, and suddenly found himself laughing—a surprisingly carefree, delighted sound. Pine Tree cowering; ash swirling around him; the sweet, electric current of power coursing through his newfound veins... This was the most _him _he’d felt in millennia.

Better yet, the fire was melting the ice inside him, humming away the sickly shifting feeling, loosening his chest. Finally, he found he could breathe again.

“**BUT HEY**,” said Bill, striding forwards, consciously dimming his blaze to less eyeball-scorching levels as Pine Tree pressed back against the wall of cabinets, “**WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE, RIGHT? NOW THAT WE’VE GOT THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS ALL WORKED OUT, WHADDAYA SAY?”** With an oddly bereft twinge, like the tide going out in him, Bill extinguished himself, leaving Pine Tree blinking in the sudden dimness. He crouched down on his heels with a flourish and proffered his hand to the startled human. “Roomies?”

Pine Tree stared, uncomprehending. “What?”

“I seem to be in a BIT OF A BIND.” Bill rolled the outstretched hand lazily, blue sparks flickering around his fingers. Pine Tree eyed it nervously. “Y’see, my visit to this dimension may be a _titch _unexpected, and I’ve got the E.O.s breathing down my neck, and I’m not exactly in a position to check into a hotel here, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. In layman’s terms, I’m UP SHIT CREEK WITHOUT A SOCIAL NETWORK!”

_“What?” _Pine Tree repeated.

Bill rolled his eye; his outstretched arm was staring to get tired. “Yeesh, AT LEAST PRETEND TO KEEP UP, kid! I need a place to crash. And hey, wouldya look at that: I fell right in your lap!” He batted his eyelashes at the brunet.

Pine Tree’s mouth worked soundlessly, eyes trailing from the scorched chair, to Bill, to the ashen remains of the rope scattered on the tile floor, and back. The expression on his pale face said, plain as day: _Is this guy for real?_

“No,” Pine Tree said, incredulous, when Bill made no further move. Then: “Nope, non, nein, numquam.”

“Yes,” Bill said, “yup, oui, ja, ita vero.”

“_No,” _insisted Pine Tree, a crafty gleam entering his eyes. “Demon rules, right? You can’t make me do anything. I haven’t made a deal with you.”

Bill cackled, grin widening. _Looks like _someone _did his homework. _“Oh, I beg to differ.” Across his eye flickered a moving image of a few minutes ago—and _whew, _the magic felt strange, flowing over a flesh-and-blood eyeball like that—the table, the kitchen, those ugly cabinets; and above it all, Pine Tree’s tinny voice, guarded and sanctimonious all at once: _“The first question’s an easy one.”_

Pine Tree gaped. “Wait—no—” He floundered for words for a highly entertaining moment, then said, lamely, “You said that was a freebie.”

“There are no freebies in life,” said Bill, shrugging with faux helplessness: _What can you do? _“That’s the ol’ CAVEAT EMPTOR for ya!”

Pine Tree cast a weary look about him, as though wondering how their roles had so quickly been reversed, then sighed and climbed to his feet, ignoring the offered hand up. Bill let it drop to his side. “Fine. What do you want? My soul? My firstborn child? A million dollars in unmarked notes?”

Bill laughed, leaning back against the wall. “Jeez, paranoid much?” He hesitated. “Although, you wouldn’t happen to have that last one on you, would you?”

Pine Tree stared at him flatly.

“Kidding, kidding!” said Bill, holding up his hands. “Yeesh, you sure your name’s not GULLIBLE PINES?”

“Um, yes.”

“What if I told you it was written on the ceiling_?”_

“That’s it,” Pine Tree said, folding his arms over his chest. It was almost enough to hide his still-shaken expression. “It’s too late to do this. Either state your terms or get out.”

“Tsk, tsk!” Bill shook his head fondly. “YOU DRIVE A HARD BARGAIN! But here’s the sitch: I’m in trouble, yadda yadda, generic threat, et cetera, et cetera. BOTTOM LINE: I need a place to lay low for a while.” He glanced around the room. The gift shop, designed as it was to sell garbage trinkets to garbage people, had been furnished with a sort of niche, cohesive—if totally overdone—theme. The same, however, could not be said of the kitchen: shoplifted-from-IKEA furniture, unidentifiable goo drying on the countertop, glitter ground into every available crevice like heroine at a crack house. “Really, REALLY low.”

Pine Tree chewed on his bottom lip. “And that’s _all _you want.”

“Mind you,” Bill added quickly, before that hopeful look could take hold, “I’m SWEARING YOU TO SECRECY. Meaning”—he gestured as though locking his lips and tossing away the key— “hush-hush around the family.”

“What?” Pine Tree’s face fell—most likely at no longer having direct access to the help of this ‘Great-Uncle Ford.’ Bill wasn’t an idiot; anyone who gave their employees tasers and sent them on wild goose chases was also someone who would have zero qualms about chucking Bill into the first pocket dimension they saw. “But—They _live _here.” Pine Tree stared at him, as though that would prompt some capricious change of heart. “You can’t possibly expect me to hide your being here from them for any extended amount of time.”

Bill shrugged mercilessly. “THEN I SUGGEST YOU GET ON THAT. Just tell them I’m a COLLECTIVE IMAGINING or something!”

“‘Or something,’” echoed Pine Tree.

“OR SOMETHING!” Bill agreed.

“Okay, fine.” Pine Tree had been rubbing the bridge of his nose, like prolonged exposure to Bill was giving him a killer headache, but now he straightened up, gathering himself for some perceived final charge. “But deals work both ways. I want something, too.”

“Sure,” Bill said easily. No harm in letting the kid propose something. Whether or not Bill actually agreed to the terms—now, _that_ was another matter entirely.

Pine Tree blinked. Evidently, this wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting, and Bill let himself feel a brief surge of pride for his mercurial nature for keeping it fresh. “Well. You can’t harm my family—_any _of them, in any way, shape, or form,” he added before Bill could interject. “And, uh...” He cast his eyes around the kitchen, finally seizing upon the pile of clear goo drying on the countertop. “You’ll help me catch the shapeshifter.”

Bill’s eye crinkled in amusement. “Whatever you say, kid. I’ll help you ‘catch’ the ‘shapeshifter.’” He stuck his hand out. “So, we got a deal?”

Pine Tree took a deep breath and let it out, hair fluttering. “Deal.”

Where their hands clasped, blue flames erupted with a soft _whoosh_, sending shadows flickering frantically up the walls. A rush and hum of energy vibrated from the tightly-wound coil at Bill’s core, up through his limbs and into the human standing opposite him. Pine Tree’s face was cast in cobalt in the preternatural light.

When the fire died down, leaving the two of them standing in a kitchen that seemed at once duller and more cramped, Pine Tree was smiling slightly, a bleary, half-dazed look in his eyes; he probably wasn’t even aware of his expression.

Bill grinned back anyway.

* * *

Before he collapsed into bed that night, utterly drained and yet still slightly buzzed—magic? Adrenaline? Some combination of the two? He was too tired to care—Dipper grabbed the notebook lying open on his desk. It was filled with diagrams and dead-end jot notes on the shifter—_original form: unknown, diet: unknown, lifespan: unknown, personality: ASSHOLE—_but he flipped to a blank page. Already half-asleep, he scrawled a title across the top:

**BILL CIPHER**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> second chapter, whoop whoop! also, spot the shrek 2 reference


	3. Bill Makes the Tactical Decision to Run Away From His Problems

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry, short chapter today boys; don't worry they'll get longer again, i can't help myself lmao

Pine Tree had been ready to put him on the couch, until Bill—very generously, and with minimal mocking laughter, even! –pointed out the _immense stupidity _of that plan.

_Oh, the couch? The one LITERALLY EVERYONE IN YOUR FAMILY (AND THEN SOME; SERIOUSLY, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHY THAT BABY-MAN IS IN SO MANY OF THESE PHOTOS—HEY YOURSELF, I’M STAYING HERE, I’LL TOUCH WHATEVER I WANT!) walks by SEVERAL TIMES A DAY? Sure, why not? Shall I print out some HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DEMON LIVING IN YOUR HOUSE (AND ALSO YOUR GREAT-NEPHEW’S INCOMPETENCE) pamphlets while I’m at it?_

_Fine, _Pine Tree had said through gritted teeth, rubbing a palm down his face._ How about the ‘guest room,’ then? Don’t answer that. Just tell me whether or not you’ll need access to the bathroom. _

So, Bill found himself sitting, criss-cross-applesauce, on a threadbare couch, experiencing a deep and profound realization as to why Pine Tree had put ‘guest room’ in air quotes.

He’d taken in the rest of the Shack—the first floor, at least, though that was more from peering in doorways as Pine Tree marched him past than any formal introduction; he was still waiting on that tour—and had tried to lower his expectations accordingly. No Jacuzzi? Fine. No human-skin throw pillows? Great. No chorus of severed heads to serenade him as he trashed both of the former? More like no _problemo!_

But Bill couldn’t deny: a room with windows would’ve been nice.

The stagnant, dust-covered space didn’t exactly scream _hospitality. _Although Bill half-expected it to start screaming itself—it looked like the kind of place someone would bury secrets (and possibly bodies, though again: trying not to get his hopes up) and then consign problem guests to.

All the furniture, including his couch, had been pushed to the very edges of the room, affording a clear view of the faded wooden floor. The sun-washed planks were darker in a large rectangle, as though someone had recently removed a rug. There was only one light source—a mustard-yellow lamp next to the door—and yes, that _was _including the one window, not that it counted anymore. Some genius had boarded it up, hammering on wooden planks and nails until only a few weak slivers of moonlight spilled into the room.

All in all, the rushed, afterthought-like quality of his quarters reminded Bill of a storage room—except for how the cabinets and shelves had been meticulously scraped clean of any actual belongings.

It reeked of secrets. Luckily for Pine Tree, Bill didn’t particularly care.

It had been four hours since Pine Tree had quarantined him in this room. Though he’d never heard a key turn in the lock, Bill harboured no delusions about his position’s volition; the thick wooden door was an airlock, keeping Bill and everything he brought with him—weirdness, law enforcement, enough cosmic wake-up calls to keep this entire planet on time for their morning shift—away from Pine Tree’s family. And, most likely, any breakable items.

At first, the room had been a novelty. He’d amused himself first by trying to pull the floorboards up, and then by plucking the splinters they gave him out of his fingers and laying them end-to-end to see how far they could reach across the floor (halfway, not counting the ones he lost in the couch cushions). He’d searched for any valuables, fruitlessly. He’d attempted to set fire to several dust bunnies, slightly less fruitlessly.

But the hours had trickled away, and Pine Tree hadn’t come back, and now Bill was bored.

He flopped backwards onto the couch from his sitting position and huffed out a breath. The ancient, thick-faced clock on the wall—one of the highlights of the room, second only to the creaky floorboards—claimed it was three in the morning. It dawned on Bill, as he rolled over to lie facedown on his front, that the reason Pine Tree had seemingly vanished was probably because the kid was passed out cold.

_Huh. _Actually, being unconscious didn’t sound too bad right about now. It sure beat holding staring contests with the water stains on the ceiling. (Winning by a landslide, it turned out, got boring incredibly quickly when your opponents were inanimate and therefore unable to appreciate your triumphant gloating.)

In the end, his options boiled down to either granting sections of the ceiling sentience, or attempting to sleep.

So, propelled by the thought that Pine Tree would _definitely _kick him out if he started cursing sections of the Shack with genius-level IQ, Bill closed his eye (not really necessary, what with his face mushed into the couch cushions, but he was nothing if not a method actor) and tried to slow his breathing.

_In. Out_

_In. Out._

_In. Do people actually do this for eight hours straight? No wonder they’re so uptight. Out._

_In._

_Out._

_Innnnnnnnnnnnnnnn..._

_...nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnothing. there’s nothing for you here, not anymore, not power not sanctuary not freedom no no no no NO NO NO **NO**_

Bill bolted upright, a cold fist clenching around his chest. Propped up on his arms, he stared wildly into the monochrome darkness of the room, spitting out fuzzy wads of couch lint, heart scrabbling against his ribs like a live thing.

Okay, fine. No sleeping.

He rolled off the couch, standing in the middle of the furniture ringing the room and telling himself that he was too angry to conk out. Pine Tree could’ve at least given him a heads-up. A simple, _Hey, I’m about to drop off the grid and be a slave to biology for the next eight hours, so help yourself to the minibar. _

But _nooo. _Instead: three a.m., storage room, old couch. Rude much?

As Bill stood, filling his head with loud, righteously annoyed thoughts, he started to feel better. And as his heart slowed and steadied itself, as he realized the room was in shades of black and white simply because it was nighttime, as the tremors in his hands stilled, he became aware of something:

He was peckish.

He craned his neck from side to side, only just recognizing the stiffness for what it was. Reaching around behind himself and under the neckline of his shirt, gingerly probing the base of his neck, his fingers found a pair of tender spots at the junction of his neck and shoulders. He pressed down, lightly, on one of them, and a slight shiver ran down his spine, echoed by an aching emptiness—not painful. Not yet.

He dropped his hands quickly. Apparently, his little performance in the kitchen earlier in the evening had taken more out of him than he’d realized. His energy reserves were running a smidgeon low.

Fortuitously, Bill had a pretty good idea of how to fix that.

His energy-metabolising glands might be on his neck in this form, but he’d bet his bowtie they fulfilled the same basic function: collecting mental energy, then converting it into fuel. For a moment, Bill wanted to laugh. Of all the things to carry over into a meatsack, Ax had picked _these? _His eye, and what was effectively a feeding orifice? He took back what he’d said about them not having a sense of humour.

But that line of thinking was soon drowned out by another. Well, it was more of a single thought than an entire line of them—a lone idea, crystallizing in his mind’s eye:

Pine Tree and that sister of his, sound asleep upstairs.

Bill grinned to himself. _No minibar? Fine. Looks like I’ll just have to settle for home brew._

He mentally patted himself on the back and resolved to share that line—sans context, perhaps—with Pine Tree. Then he eased open the door to the room, poking his head out and glancing down the hallway. _All clear._

Creeping down the hall, feet _shushing _softly against the carpet, Bill did his best to avoid stepping on creaky floorboards—which, he was starting to suspect, meant _all of them—_and suppress the urge to nose around. That proved harder than he thought. There seemed to be endless doors, each of them promising something different: NO REFUNDS or WASH YOUR HANDS FIRST, PLEASE or, in pink sparkly gel pen, WHOEVER KEEPS LEAVING THE TOILET SEAT UP NEEDS TO STOP BEFORE I GLUE IT DOWN D:< XOXO. The Shack, he decided approvingly, appeared to be in a constant state of barely-held-together chaos—which, as everyone knows, is second only to pure, unadulterated chaos.

Maybe his stay here would be more than an unsavoury necessity—_fun, _even.

Then again, maybe the author of the note had been joking about gluing the toilet seats down.

Bill reached the end of the hallway and found himself staring up a staircase. Moonlight fell in watery slats from the next room, lending the stairs a striped, uneven look. If he concentrated, he could almost hear Pine Tree, snoring away.

He started up the stairs, marvelling at the rough-yet-smooth feel of the wooden banister under his hand, and reviewed the plan. He was going to take from Pine Tree; he’d determined that right off the bat. Not only did he not know or particularly care where Little Miss Undue Fashion Opinions slept, there wasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell he was going to let her essence anywhere _near_ him. She’d probably give him mental diabetes, anyway.

At the top of the staircase, the stairs ended in a hatch in the ceiling. Slowly, carefully, Bill cracked the hatch open and poked his head up into the attic above.

Nothing moved. Someone—presumably Pine Tree—had left the reading light on, affording him a view into a room that, tragically, had none of his own’s serial killer chic. It was kinda underwhelming, actually. Just a desk scattered with papers, a weathered-looking nightstand, a chest of drawers, and—lo! —a bed pushed against one wall to be under the attic’s only window; a stained-glass number with nary a board in sight.

Picking his way around various scattered notebooks, Bill padded over to the bed. It was heaped with a mess of tangled navy sheets. There was no visible pillow, or—more pressingly—Pine Tree.

He hesitated. What was that saying about playing jump rope with a gun? Pine Tree might not even _be _here. He might be dead. In fact, judging from the state of the sheets, Bill estimated there was a pretty fair chance Pine Tree had been murdered in this bed. Recently.

He was revaluating his self-imposed dietary restrictions when a soft snuffle drifted up to him. He paused, leaning closer. There it was again—from under the snarl of blankets, quiet, even breaths.

Cautiously, Bill peeled back the top layer, and voila: Pine Tree’s face appeared, pale against the dark bedding. He felt one corner of his mouth quirk up. The kid was more relaxed than Bill had seen him, his perpetually-furrowed brow smoothed in sleep. As he watched, Pine Tree made a soft huffing sound, then rolled over, pulling the blankets with him.

For a moment, Bill just stood there, looking down at Pine Tree and feeling oddly like a kid in a candy store. Then, with a featherlight touch, he rested his fingertips on Pine Tree’s forehead, gently brushing the hair aside. Pine Tree scrunched up his nose ever-so-slightly at the contact, and Bill found himself tweaking the plan. _Do I really need to drain him? Nah; if I don’t, I can take from him several times. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do: just skim his mind. He won’t even know the difference. Good thinking, Bill. Why, thank you, Bill!_

He let his fingers migrate to Pine Tree’s temples, mapping out the mental pressure points. Then he reached for the kid’s mind.

Nothing.

Bill’s eyebrows drew together. He tried again, but as before: no dice. It wasn’t that there was nothing _there, _per se: he could definitely sense _something_, whispering just beyond the reach of the physical. The problem was, it wasn’t Pine Tree’s mental energy. Brushing against it made Bill flinch away, chest filled with an uncomfortable fluttering, squeezing sensation—like his lungs were being pumped with expanding laughing gas and his skin was rapidly becoming too tight for his insides.

He took a step back, eye narrowed. Pine Tree’s relaxed form had taken on a new, ominous angle. Of course—_of course _he would have some kind of mental shielding; Bill felt stupid for not seeing it before. How else would he feel comfortable enough in the presence of Bill—a self-announced _dream demon—_ to purposefully fall asleep?

And that brought up a new, disconcerting train of thought: Did Pine Tree know more about Bill than he was letting on? Bill tensed, glancing suspiciously around the attic. Suddenly, every shadow, every lightless corner had teeth. He half-expected Pine Tree’s eyes to snap open.

Just what, exactly, did this ‘Great-Uncle Ford’ do?

Minutes, measured by the glowing numbers of Pine Tree’s alarm clock, ticked by. Pine Tree breathed. The attic’s old wooden walls creaked in a passing breeze.

And Bill approached the bed again.

If the kid had anything up his sleeve, he decided, scrutinizing the meticulous way Pine Tree kept his arms tucked into his self-made blanket burrito, he would have known better than to make a deal. And he _definitely _would have known better than to pick Bill up in the first place.

_Besides. Taking down a mental shield is just the kind of pick-me-up I’ve been looking for._

He laid his fingertips on Pine Tree’s temples, gingerly this time, and _focused_. Focused on the resistance where Pine Tree’s mind should be. Focused on the sleep-warm skin beneath his fingers. Focused his attention into a white-hot spike, gritting his teeth against the mental pushback and boring a pinhole into the barrier, and huh, wasn’t that funny, up this close the energy didn’t feel foreign at all, almost as if—

_Grey—_

_—disorientation but that’s better than what’s coming don’t hold your breath—_Hah, get it? No? Just me?—

_—but he’s not alone never alone will never be alone. Not here—_

_—shades. Cool hands but they might as well be dust for all he can feel. They _are_ dust, for one moment, scattering in the wind; then pulling themselves together again, decomposing on loop—_

_“Tell me: How does one challenge a force of nature... and _win?”

_—rhetorical question; she sure showed him. Show not tell. She’d make a hell of a screenwriter—_

_ —the spaces between the stars. _You didn’t exactly roll out the welcome wagon. _Crackling fire—_

_Ooh, ooh, I know this one! False. Fire doesn’t crackle. _

_It _screams_. _

The onslaught receded as abruptly as it had attacked, and Bill reared back, almost falling on his ass. He whipped his head around, blinking hard, but his vision refused to clear. The world was a blur of colours and shapes, muffled and sharpened at once. His ears were ringing, too, so loud it sent dull stabs of pain into his eardrums, but he could still hear his heart pounding—or maybe those were just the vibrations. Each _thud _reverberated in his bones like a jackhammer.

His vision tilted and wobbled, and he stumbled, shaking his head, and then—when that did nothing to relieve the pressure mounting in his temples—grinding the heels of his palms into his forehead. His chest burned. There was something lodged in his throat—no, there was no more air in the attic. Someone had come along and siphoned it all out while he was in Pine Tree’s mind and now he was suffocating.

He staggered to the side, dully aware of his shoulder striking the wall. He needed to breathe. He needed to get away. He needed to be gone gone gonegone_gone—_

Something frantic twisted, then _wrenched_ itself free inside of him. There was a silent flash-bang, a psychic one-two punch, and Bill felt himself collapse into the space between space, not caring where he wound up, just needing _out. _

As he vanished, a sharp smell pierced through his haze—smoke, curling up from where he’d been standing. The coil curved over itself, a hooked line like a smirk, oddly clear in his muddy vision. He could swear it winked at him. Then he was gone, and so was the smoke, and the night fell silent again.

* * *

Dipper shot up in bed, squinting into the darkness of his room. He’d been dreaming about... toast? Burnt toast? Eyes still gritty with sleep, he glanced at his alarm clock, then inwardly groaned. That... that was _not _a happy time to be awake at.

As he flopped backwards into bed, burrowing under the covers again—it got _cold _in the drafty attic at night—he could still smell the smoke of his dream. It lulled him off to a peaceful, dreamless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh no bill. bill what is you doing


	4. Dumb and Dumber: The Poorly-Budgeted Sequel

Dipper chewed his lower lip in concentration as he removed the last screw. Carefully—he’d already caught hell from Stan about how expensive these things were to finagle—he set the OREGON: PACIFIC WONDERLAND licence plate down on the gravel driveway beside him.

He switched the screwdriver to his other hand and picked up the new plate, bracing it against the car’s bumper as he screwed it into place. _Righty tightly, lefty loosey. _He’d picked it out of Stan’s stash himself: white with a pale green pine tree watermark, it wasn’t dissimilar enough that one of his family members would immediately spot the difference (in the immortal words of Stan: “A plate is a plate. I don’t know why we even run the dishwasher with these bad boys in the RV!”). It wasn’t expired yet. And, most importantly, it was generic as all hell.

The crisp morning air was fresh in Dipper’s lungs, birds twittering from the forest. When the last screw refused to be tightened any further, he wiped an arm across his brow and settled back on his knees, tipping his head back to stare into the sky, finally letting himself think about yesterday.

Dipper had known about the multiverse before last night, of course. Kind of. It was impossible to have a great-uncle like Ford and not at least be aware of the general shape of your own ignorance. But there was a big difference between _knowing, _in an academic sense, that a thing existed, and having a denizen of said thing asleep in your storage room.

Somewhere behind that vast openness, Dipper found himself thinking, still looking at the sky, stars wheeled around his planet. And beyond those—other worlds. Other galaxies. Other _dimensions. _And, rising above all the swirling, empyrean cosmos in his mind’s eye: a dark, fortress-like epicenter. A prison. One the likes of which his world had never seen, one whose walls loomed on the edges of consciousness, one whose inmates were—were—

“If you’re looking for a reason to continue existing,” said Bill, directly into Dipper’s ear, “IT’S NOT UP THERE. I already checked.”

Dipper was on his feet in a flash, whirling around with a fierce yelp, the screwdriver clutched out in front of him like a knife. Bill quirked an amused eyebrow, and Dipper realized too late that he was not, in fact, holding a screwdriver anymore, but the old licence plate. One of its blunt ends was pointed at Bill’s chest. Face flushing, he tucked the plate back under his arm, eying the dream demon suspiciously. “Hello,” he said, wary, when Bill made no immediate move to burst into flame.

There was a chance, of course, that Bill could only do what he’d done yesterday when in a kitchen, or tied up, or some other condition that had been met last night—some supernatural creatures had oddly specific powers like that—but Dipper couldn’t make that sound plausible, even to himself. So, for the meantime, he was erring on the side of caution. And hopefully not ending up barbequed.

“HOWDY THERE! Oh, what’s that face for? Did I interrupt your EXISTENTIAL WALLOWING?” Bill planted his hands on his hips, and Dipper frowned, finally noticing his clothing. The last time he’d seen Bill, he’d looked like a... well, like a fugitive: windblown, slightly scuffed, practically drowning in a tattered, one-size-fits-all-we-promise jumpsuits.

This was... not that.

Bill now wore a pair of dress pants and a white Oxford shirt, rolled up to the elbows, both immaculately creased. To go with it, he’d somehow procured a pair of glossy dress shoes that looked worryingly designer. If Dipper didn’t know better—and who knew, maybe he didn’t—he’d swear that Bill had gotten a haircut; his hair, now neat, seemed cropped shorter than it had been a few hours ago. Most notably, a triangular eyepatch now covered his left eye. Had that been there yesterday?

Dipper had no idea where Bill had gotten any of this—certainly not from the storage room. But Dipper felt his mouth run dry regardless. If he had thought Bill looked like a model before...

Bill shot him a shark-like grin, and the effect was immediately shattered. Dipper settled back, the gravel digging into his legs through his jeans, feeling irrationally relieved. It was easier to deal with a crazed supernatural creature than a suddenly very put-together, _very _attractive person. Dealing with crazed supernatural creatures was practically his day job.

Bill’s grin widened at the attention. “You like my new digs?” he said, straightening his already-straight collar.

Dipper flushed, dragging his gaze to Bill’s eye. Easier to remember he wasn’t a regular guy when the proof was staring him in the face. “Please don’t tell me you used my credit card for that.”

“Wasn’t planning to!” Bill said brightly. Then he tilted his head, peering around Dipper. “Whatcha doing to WINDOWS 10 ON WHEELS over there?”

“Okay, you know what, no,” Dipper said, angling himself to stand protectively between Bill and the car. “I’m setting a ground rule: No mocking my stuff.” He hesitated. “Also, how do you know about Windows 10 but not bedsheets?”

“Selective omniscience,” Bill said flippantly. He floated upwards, then hovered there, suspended a few feet above the ground. “And THAT is not a car. It’s an AFFRONT TO LANDFILLS!”

“Annnd of course you can fly,” said Dipper flatly, to no one in particular. He turned back to the car; it was slightly more difficult to pretend Bill was just another prying tourist when he was hanging in the sky, glowing like a second goddamn sun. “If you’re still curious, I just spent several hours replacing these tires and licence plate. It’s not perfect, but it should keep those... what did you call them?”

Bill said several unrepeatable words. Literally unrepeatable. At least, Dipper assumed they were words—they felt like sand, blowing in one ear and out the other, leaving Dipper feeling mildly dizzy and, somehow, mentally wind blasted.

He elected to continue as though Bill hadn’t spoken. Which he might not have—Dipper found he was already forgetting. He shook his head to clear it. “Right, Enforcement Officers. It should keep them off our tails for now.” He eyed the car critically. “Of course, I’ll still have to keep my family away from it...” He tapped a hand thoughtfully on his chin. “Huh. Maybe I should have emptied the gas tank. Or cut the fuel line. Or... nope, wait, that’s definitely fatal.” 

Bill, meanwhile, had flipped upside-down and was scanning his gaze along the horizon line. His eye lit up when it landed on the pine tree-themed licence plate. Dipper pointed the screwdriver at him and said, “Don’t even think about it.”

Bill snapped him a sloppy salute, still upside-down. “Aye-aye, Captain Buzzkill!”

Tucking the screwdriver into his back jeans pocket, Dipper started back towards the Shack. “What’re we doing now?” Bill called after him, spinning himself upright and touching down in one motion like an anti-gravity acrobat.

_We? _Dipper opened his mouth to correct Bill, then paused. If Bill was with him, he could keep an eye on him. Who knew what he’d do if left to his own devices, especially with everyone else asleep?

Besides... This could turn into a learning experience. Dipper had never met an actual demon before, and—if their deal meant anything, which he couldn’t know for sure, because _he’d never met an actual demon before—_passing up this chance would be stupid. Stupider than harbouring an interdimensional fugitive.

So. Stupider than usual.

“I don’t know about you, but _I’m _going to eat breakfast. Then...” Dipper glanced over his shoulder at Bill with a grim smile. “We’re going to go run some errands.”

* * *

“Y’know, where I come from, a smile like that usually indicates a body count. And I’m talkin’ BARE MINIMUM, here.”

Dipper sniffed as he loaded the last bag into the trunk. “Buying groceries is an important chore. Besides, according to the chore chart, it’s my turn this week.” Actually, the chore chart had been saying it was Dipper’s turn for the past two months. He was starting to suspect a slight flaw in the system, but so far, he’d been unable to find any evidence that didn’t suddenly and mysteriously turn up missing the moment it was brought to Mabel’s attention.

“You know,” he grunted, slamming the trunk lid shut, “this would go a lot more quickly if you _helped _me.”

Bill shot him a one-eyed wink over the rim of his sunglasses as Dipper slid back into the driver’s seat. “Sorry, kid, NOT IN MY CONTRACT!”

The sunglasses, much like the chore chart, had been Dipper’s idea. Fortunately, they seemed to be working better than it. He’d figured that Bill could mostly pass for human so long as he didn’t talk to and/or eviscerate anyone—except for that _eye. _The eye that was the colour and luminosity of a yellow traffic light. The eye that would catch the Enforcement Officers’ attention and get the two of them thrown into a pocket dimension—which sounded cool in Dipper’s head, but was almost certainly just something he’d read in a sci-fi novel. He really had no clue what the consequences for this might be.

Besides, there was something satisfying about Bill in a pair of Mabel’s cheap Glitter Gurl sunglasses. Even if he _was_ pulling them off better than should be possible.

“Are you _done _with your pathetic biological housekeeping?_” _Bill whined, reclining his seat all the way back to stare straight up at the car roof. “’Cause I saw a freshly-painted fence back near the laundromat that I’d MUCH RATHER be watching.”

Dipper rolled his eyes. “If you’re going to be a ham, you can ride in the back with the rest of the groceries.”

“Oh, hardy-har,” said Bill, lolling his head to the side to give him what Dipper assumed was a scathing look. Sunlight glinted off the rhinestones at the corners of his sunglasses. “You take few millennia off and suddenly EVERYONE’S A COMEDIAN.”

Dipper almost huffed a laugh, but caught himself. “Look, we’re almost done,” he said, pulling out of the Walmart parking lot. “There’s just one stop left. And it’ll be a bit more exciting than grocery shopping, if I’m unlucky—which is basically a given, at this point.”

Though Bill didn’t move, Dipper could feel his ears prick up. “And what might this Wunderquest be?”

Dipper didn’t take his eyes of the road. “Open up my backpack.”

There was a rustling as Bill unzipped the bag by his feet, followed by more rustling. Then silence. Then an appreciative whistle. “Kid, you’ve been holding out on me!”

_Huh. That wasn’t the response I was— _Dipper glanced at Bill and choked. “Oh, come _on,” _he managed.

Bill was holding up a navy-blue suit jacket, Dipper’s backpack open on his lap. The jacket, though rumpled from its time in the bag, still managed to look more expensive than anything Dipper owned. Even in his periphery, he could see the muted lustre of high-quality fabric. As if that weren’t quite damning enough, there was still a Nordstrom label attached to the collar.

“Well, that is just _fantastic_.” Dipper cringed, letting his head thump back against the headrest. “As if harbouring a criminal wasn’t bad enough, it turns out I’m also a shoplifter.”

“Don’t forget a kidnapper and a general, ALL-AROUND terrible person!” added Bill, snapping his seat back into a sitting position.

Dipper shot him a look out of the corner of his eye. “Before, you insisted _I _was the one being kidnapped.”

Bill shrugged modestly. “I had time to do some thinking last night. And I’ve come to the conclusion that this is all, in fact, your fault. CONGRATULATIONS!”

Salmon-coloured confetti popped into existence above Dipper with a sound like a party popper exploding, fluttering down around him to settle on his shoulders. He spat pieces of worryingly thick streamers out of his mouth. “First of all, there’s no universe—okay, _very few universes—_in which this is my fault. Second of all, don’t do that to the driver, man. I know you’re going to say you don’t care about road rash because it’s a human construct and has no bearing on your existence, but I do.”

Bill pretended to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye. “Took the words right outta my mouth. Besides, I wouldn’t endanger you like that, kid!”

“Somehow, I find that hard to believe. Literally everything you’ve done so far has endangered me.”

“Well, sure. But I’D HATE TO BREAK YOUR STREAK NOW! First kidnapping, then harbouring a fugitive, now shoplifting? You’re three for three, Pine Tree! I, for one, can’t _wait _to see what you do next. High treason? MURDER? Arson’s always been a PERSONAL FAVOURITE.”

“Keep talking, and road rash is going to have a whole lot of bearing on your existence,” Dipper grumbled, but there was no heat behind the threat. He’d promised Bill sanctuary—he didn’t want his first experience with demons to be finding out what happened if he broke a deal.

And Bill could complain all he wanted, but he still had to fulfill his end of the bargain. Which was why they were here.

Dipper pulled the car over to the side of the road, turned the key in the ignition, then stepped out onto the sidewalk, adjusting the brim of his cap. “Don’t do anything weird,” he instructed Bill, catching a glimpse of a stuck-out tongue before he slammed the door.

He set off down the sidewalk, not checking if the dream demon was following or not. After a few minutes, his destination came into view.

Gravity Malls Shopping Complex looked much the same as it had yesterday—and by that, Dipper meant no major structures had been destroyed. In a town like Gravity Falls, that really _was _an accomplishment. It felt like a different place, though; windows dark, foyer empty, plaza eerily still without the background hum of shoppers. Someone had strung bright yellow POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS tape across the main doors, and its loose ends fluttered in a passing breeze. A plastic bag blew across the parking lot, deserted save for a police car with GFPD stencilled onto the side.

“Aw, man,” Dipper muttered. “They’ve already been here.” He’d been hoping to get to the mall _before _law enforcement. Possibly he should’ve bought groceries later.

“I hate to be the one to burst your naïve little bubble,” Bill said from beside him, shaking his head sadly, “but you’re supposed to _flee _crime scenes, kid, not PAY THEM SCENIC VISITS.”

Where had _he _come from? Dipper had never heard him open the car door. He made a mental note to add _teleportation? _to Bill’s entry. “I wouldn’t call it a crime scene, exactly,” he said, stepping up to the side of the mall, shouldering his backpack. “More like... the site of some unpleasant-but-still-perfectly-legal activities.”

Bill arched an eyebrow. “That why we’re removing evidence?”

Dipper craned his head back, eyes squinting, trying to figure out if anyone would believe that some teenager had chucked a brick through the skylight. He figured the odds were 50-50; 80-20 if he threw Robbie under the bus. “We’re not removing evidence. We’re doing the public a service and cleaning up, like the civic-minded citizens we are, after some _jackass_”—he pointedly didn’t look at Bill— “smashed the glass.”

Bill chortled. “Jeez. And they call _me _a liar!” He tilted his head, following Dipper’s line of sight to the roof. “So, what, Fordsie demoted you to clean-up duty? HARSH.”

“It’s not a _demotion,” _said Dipper, bristling. “It’s just one facet of the job. Which has many facets, several of which are more glamorous than this. Like a... a diamond made of moral obligation. Or something.”

“Ah.” Bill nodded knowingly. “So THAT’S why sister dear is still snoring away while YOU DO THE GRUNT WORK. Come to think of it, I didn’t see her around yesterday, either! What, is this some sort of strike? Are we crossing a picket line right now?”

_No, but it wasn’t her fault. _Swallowing back the response, Dipper stepped up to the glass doors, then glanced back over his shoulder at Bill. “We’ll have to go in.”

“And your plan is to just waltz in through the front doors?” Bill folded his arms across his chest, looking amused and a little impressed. “You’re crazy, I’ll give you that!”

“As a matter of fact, yes, that is the plan,” Dipper said, shading his eyes with a hand as he peered into the darkened foyer. The coast seemed clear—or as clear as it could get through the murky glass. “There isn’t really any other option; this is the only way in or out. How this place was ever approved as a mall is one of the great unsolved mysteries of this town.”

He reached for the door handle; it jiggled, then stuck. He tried it again, with the same result. _Crap. _He took a half-step back, a hand on his chin. “It’s locked. Maybe we could go around back? No, right—only one door. If only this building weren’t one big fire safety code violation! Well, we could always—”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dipper saw Bill do... _something. _Some complex series of gestures. Though his hand moved too quickly for Dipper to track, the whole movement had a certain laziness to it, a practiced ease.

There was a hissing sound, and Dipper whipped his head back around just in time to catch a sharp whiff of burning metal. A thin trail of smoke coil upwards from the door, and drops of red-hot metal sizzled onto the pavement as the locking mechanism melted.

The door swung inwards silently, and Bill swept into an exaggerated bow. “Ladies first,” he said sweetly, one arm extended towards Dipper.

“Well,” Dipper said as stared at the now-unlocked door, stepping over the threshold into the abandoned mall, “fine, if you want to be _pedestrian _about it.” His voice was dry, but his hands itched for his notebook. He tried to commit to memory the hand gestures Bill had done, though even now, all he could remember was a vague sense of impossibility. _Magic, _he thought with a little thrill. He’d seen science—no matter how dubious—do enough crazy things as Ford’s apprentice that it had lost a little bit of the shine, but magic was still... Well, _magic._

“Don’t hurt yourself,” said Bill with a one-eyed wink, breezing past him, and Dipper realized, flushing, that he’d been stopped in the entranceway. _So much for ‘unimpressed,’ _he thought ruefully, taking off after Bill, who had stopped in the main lobby and was peering around, looking interested.

“Righty-O!” Bill said as soon as Dipper pulled up beside him, clapping briskly. “I’ll just get myself outta your way, then. You case the joint, I’ll go investigate...” He waved his hand vaguely. “...over thataway. Those prices seem suspicious.”

Dipper raised his eyebrows. This time, he didn’t have to feign disillusionment. “Seriously, man? You want to go _window shopping _now_? _You realize we were just here yesterday, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know! SHEESH, kid, call off the dogs,” Bill said, rolling his eyes, hands held up in surrender. “I don’t know ’bout you, but I was SLIGHTLY PREOCCUPIED yesterday. What with being kidnapped and all.”

“I’ve already apologized for—” Dipper caught himself and took a deep breath, lowering his voice. The officers whose car they’d seen outside could still be here. Besides, _one _of them needed to be the mature one, and it clearly wasn’t going to be the immortal creature with millennia of life experience. “Okay, actually, fine. I can probably do this faster by myself. Unless a certain all-powerful entity feels like using magic?” he couldn’t resist adding.

“HAH!” Bill called over his shoulder, already striding away. “KEEP DREAMING, kid! Flattery will get you everywhere but into my good books!”

“‘Mleh mleh, I’m Bill and I know everything except what my own problem is, mleh mleh,’” Dipper said under his breath, patting himself on the back for being the bigger person as he stalked back across the lobby.

Being in the mall outside of operating hours felt somewhat surreal. Someone had draped a heavy tarp over the glass ceiling, blocking most of the natural light. With the electric lighting off, it cast the mall into a strange, artificial twilight. As Dipper’s sneakers squeaked on the tile floor, he realized the broken glass had been swept up. The only pop of colour was a bright yellow CAUTION: WET FLOOR sign propped up by the mangled fountain. Over the words, a custodian had scrawled CLOSED FOR THE RAPTURE. UNION RENEGOTIATIONS PENDING.

Hands in his back pockets, Dipper pivoted slowly, surveying the lobby. The shifter would’ve had to come through here to escape—even if it _hadn’t_ landed in the fountain—but there was no sign of which direction it had headed.

No _visible _sign, anyway.

Dipper shrugged off his backpack, digging out the sleek black flashlight he’d been trying to tell Bill about in the car. It was small but compact, with a surprising heft to it. When he turned it on with a click, nothing appeared to happen, the purple lens unchanging.

_Excellent. _That meant it was working.

He swept the beam back and forth across the tile, feeling slightly stupid. The illumination from the blacklight flashlight wasn’t actually visible, so to any lookers-on, it would look as though he were pointing a black tube at things randomly. As opposed to pointing a black tube at things _methodically. _

He went on, combing the lobby floor. From what he understood from Ford’s notes, the shifter was some kind of bizarre, overgrown amphibian. In order to maintain the flexibility required for shapeshifting, it had to continually secrete a mucus that kept its skin moist—and that would show up under blacklight. All he needed was to wander around aimlessly and pray the custodians had been too freaked out by what they seemed to think was the apocalypse to mop the floors.

Over by the broken Forever 21 sign, something flared as he passed the beam across it. Dipper swung the flashlight back around, and there it was: a footprint, shining a dingy white in the dimness. Moving the beam up, he saw a trail of prints, heading away from the lobby along the edges of the hallway. He stepped over them, careful not to place his feet on any of the footprints, and mentally mapped out their path.

Switching the flashlight over to his other hand, Dipper maneuvered his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture of the footprints to email to his laptop, muttering to himself as he typed. “Boot prints... about a size ten, men’s... heading east...”

Even as he typed, Dipper was painfully aware that he was practically killing time, rather than admitting he’d hit a dead end. Sure, it had been wearing size ten shoes... _yesterday. _Today, it could have four legs, or six, or, hell, _none. _Maybe it’d snatched the body of some obscure creature that levitated by pushing against the Earth’s magnetic field. Maybe...

As he tucked his phone away, a glint of light caught his attention. He turned towards it, squinting, gaze landing on the fountain.

He paced over to it, then stood, chewing on his lip and staring down into the fountain’s basin, which had been cracked almost completely in half. Copper pipes, green with age, protruded from the wreckage at odd angles like broken ribs. Cradled in the debris lay a gleam of silver.

Crouching down, Dipper peered at it. It seemed to be a fragment of metal, flickering weakly against the fractured stone, but from where it lay in the partial shadow of the fountain, it was difficult to tell. 

He hesitated just long enough to think _This is a bad idea_, then reached out and gingerly picked the thing up, turning it over in his fingers. Fortunately, he wasn’t instantly vaporized. This close, he could see that the light came from a series of unrecognizable runes etched into the surface of the metal; they glowed a deep, pulsating red in the half-light, as if in time to a lazy heartbeat.

The thing itself looked like a bracelet—well, like it might once have been a bracelet. The metal was now twisted and scorched, warped beyond recognition. Even so, it practically screamed _enchantments. _Looking closer, Dipper realized that several of the runes were dim, with scratches running through them, separating their lines. He ran the pad of his thumb along one, feeling the indentations, the dead energy of the metal. _Broken._ Whatever job this thing had been doing, it wasn’t doing it anymore.

He’d seen something like this before—he was sure of it. The memory fluttered at the corners of his mind, just out of reach. But where...

“Heya kid, three hundred bucks for sunglasses? IT’S A STEAL! Get it? Because MONEY IS A SOCIETAL DELUSION WITH NO INHERENT VALUE! Also ’cause I’m, y’know, stealing them.”

The answer leapt to his lips. _Bill. _Had he been wearing one of these? Dipper thought back to earlier; he’d been pretty preoccupied, but he was pretty sure he’d seen an answering gleam on Bill’s wrist.

Dipper hesitated, then slipped the manacle into his pocket before he could think better of it. He straightened up, glancing back over his shoulder at Bill. “C’mon, man. From what I’ve heard, you really don’t need to be adding _more _crimes to your portfolio.”

Bill shot him a sharp-edged grin from behind a kiosk. “Oh, don’t worry. Once you’ve destroyed an entire people and way of life, shoplifting is small potatoes!”

Dipper nodded along absently, eying Bill’s forearms; he couldn’t see anything like the manacle, but Bill had pulled his sleeves down to cover his wrists. “Yeah, sure— Wait, what was that?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Bill nonchalantly, grin still in place, narrowing his eye at a rack of iPhone cases. “Nothing _important.” _His gaze shifted upwards, and he tilted his head. “Hey, are those mannequins _supposed_ to be horrifically ugly? Is it to make people feel better about their own flaws? Talk about STEALTH MARKETING!”

“I don’t...” Dipper followed his line of sight to a second-floor balcony. Standing there, binoculars pressed to their eyes, were two figures—one tall and pale, the other squat and mustached—both wearing police uniforms. A golden sheriff’s badge glinted on the squat one’s lapel. Dipper felt his mouth run dry. “I don’t think those are mannequins.”

As if his words had breathed life into them, the sheriff spoke, binoculars still held tightly to his face. “Deputy Durland, I believe our vagrants have been sighted! Activate Special Mall Defense Protocol 47: Stopping Crime, Not Stopping for Coffee!”

The tall one raised his hand and asked, “Not even Starbucks?”

“_Especially _not Starbucks! Come on, deputy, you know how important it is to support local cafés! They covered this in your training.”

“What do you think we should...” Dipper said, turning to Bill. Or rather, the empty air where Bill had just been standing. “...do,” he finished flatly, sighing. “God_damn _it.” Then he took off after him.

“Hey!” the sheriff cried out after them. “Y’all are trespassing on a crime scene! Stop in the name of the law! Durland, after them!” 

There was a scuffling sound. Dipper glanced back over his shoulder to see both cops trying to run down the _up _escalator at the same time. The tall one—Durland—sniffed as he struggled against the flow of the stairs. “He called me ugly!” he said, sounding close to tears.

“Don’t listen to him, Durland!” the sheriff shouted back. “You’re as beautiful on the outside as you are on the inside.”

Durland paused, blinking at him, eyes misty. As soon as he stopped running, the escalator carried him back up to the top. “Aw, Blubs, you’re just saying that.”

“Never!” Blubs said, pressing a hand to his heart. “I will never betray my badge, my integrity, my character, the public trust...” A shy smile crept across his face. “. . Or my heart.”

“Oh, shucks,” Durland said, cheeks flaming red, “you’ve set off the sunset in my face again.”

The sheriff winked at him. “You’re every bit as beautiful as it.”

Beside Dipper, Bill made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “See, this is why mannequins shouldn’t have sentience.” He was somehow keeping up in his dress shoes—more demon magic? Dipper wasn’t ready to rule it out.

“For the last time, they’re not...” Dipper glanced behind himself and blanched. The cops were closing the distance, their guns swinging on their belts. He sped up, streaking past Bill, urging, “Go go _go,” _as the demon looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“What’s—”

“Guns,” Dipper said by way of explanation.

Bill’s eyebrows arched even higher. _“Guns? _Are those idiots allowed to have those?”

“According to the Second Amendment, yes! Now shut up and _hurry. _I’m not getting shot at twice in a weekend.”

They pelted across the lobby, the cops trailing after them. “Come on!” the sheriff called after them, already sounding out of breath. “Do your civic duty and let us arrest you!”

“Please?” added Durland hopefully.

“No!” Dipper shouted over his shoulder, painfully aware of how stupid what he was about to say was. Well, it wasn’t like he had anything left to lose. “_You _do _your _civic duty! I’m placing you under citizen’s arrest!”

The cops actually slowed for a moment, exchanging a glance. “Can... can he _do _that?” Durland said, scratching his head.

The sheriff shrugged sagely. “The law is an unknowable beast that will, if given the slightest chance, devour its own servants.” He brightened. “I’ll do your handcuffs if you do mine!”

Dipper tried to decelerate as he neared the glass doors—unlocked or not, they were still very much solid-looking—but his foot caught on an uneven tile and he pitched forwards, face-first. “Wait--!” Dipper yelped, body tensing in anticipation of the impact, but his squawk died in his throat as Bill hissed something from beside him and the door _exploded, _glass sheets crashing to the ground and shattering like a frozen waterfall. Shards of glass rained down around them as they leaped over the threshold.

And then they were out, and darting through the parking lot—Dipper pulled a face at the cop car—down the sidewalk, away from the mall, sprinting through downtown streets. They only stumbled to a stop several blocks later, when Dipper’s lungs began to burn from exertion, in front of a barbershop with a rotating candy-striped pole out front.

Doubled over, Dipper pushed hair out of his face, trying to catch his breath. Dimly, he was aware of Bill doing the same, and felt a certain smugness knowing that, inhuman or not, he could still get winded. For a moment, the only sound was their ragged breathing. Then Dipper straightened up, wiping his hands on his jeans, and caught Bill’s eye.

There was a beat of silence where they just stared at each other. Then they both broke down into hysterical laughter.

“I didn’t know you could do that with the glass!” exclaimed Dipper between snickers, stomach tingling with residual adrenaline.

Bill grinned at him, eye gleaming. “I didn’t know you could arrest people!”

“I _can’t!” _Dipper managed. “I have no idea why they bought that!” Taking a deep breath, he tried to compose himself—then made eye contact with Bill again, and snorted. They dissolved back into laughter.

As Dipper straightened up, a sobering weight settled in the pit of his stomach. What was he _doing? _Up until now, he’d managed to evade the unreality of his situation, but now it all came crashing back. Bantering and shopping with a self-admitted demon? The being that had threatened to incinerate him over living arrangements? The one that was, by every possible metric, a cosmic asshole? _Get a grip, Pines, _he told himself sternly. _Not laughing at people—creatures? entities? –like Bill’s jokes is one of those lines in the sand that keeps society from collapsing._

He determinedly became fascinated with the pavement beneath his shoes. There was nothing on the sidewalk that would set him off laughing again. Just cement, a few scraggly weeds, and... a surprising amount of blood?

Dipper looked to Bill. “You’re hurt!” he said, surprised. Not his most articulate, but true: A dramatic slash of red ran from the back of Bill’s hand up under the cuff of his shirt, glistening in the sunlight. The cut looked thin, but nasty. Trails of bright blood dripped down from it onto the sidewalk.

“Huh!” Bill turned his injured hand over, examining it with mild interest. “Check it, Pine Tree! I’VE SPRUNG A LEAK!”

“Oh, jeez.” Dipper grimaced. “You must’ve cut yourself on some of the glass from your trick at the mall. At least it looks clean.” He paused, memories of CDC violation papers from years past flashing before his mind’s eye, and amended: “So, not that clean. Here, let me see.”

Bill snatched his hand away as Dipper reached for it, shooting him a baleful glare. “Hey, kid, hands off the merchandise!”

Dipper levelled him with a flat stare. “C’mon, man. That cut _is _going to get infected, and I’m assuming that, whatever a”—he gave Bill a significant look— “you know, _that thing you are, _is, you don’t have much experience with the human body.”

Bill sniffed. “Assumptions are very dangerous things to have. Just like kittens! Better drown both of ’em now, before you regret it!”

“Look, part of passing for human is at least _pretending _to care about bleeding out all over the sidewalk. Also, not saying things like... Wait.” Dipper narrowed his eyes, pulling up short. “Wasn’t that cut... _bigger _a moment ago?”

As he looked, Dipper saw he was right: Even now, the cut was thinning, smoothing itself out. In a moment, there was nothing left but clear, unbroken skin—no hint of a scar. Bill casually wiped the remaining blood off on his slacks.

“...Right,” said Dipper, clearing his throat and looking away. “Healing magic.”

“Actually,” Bill said, straight-faced, “it’s steroids.”

Dipper stared at him.

Bill broke out in a brilliant grin. “Kidding, PT. But hey, you catch on quick! Only took, what”—he craned his head back to check the sun— “TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OR SO for you to figure out? That usually takes folks a bit more... HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE.” Behind his sunglasses, his eye flared briefly red. Dipper took a step back, but then the glittering smile reappeared, and Bill relaxed against a nearby wall, arms loosely folded across his chest. “Anywho, I sure hope DUMB AND DUMBER: THE POORLY BUDGETED (YET SOMEHOW MORE WATCHABLE) SEQUEL take inventory!”

It took Dipper a moment to realize Bill was talking about Blubs and Durland, and he squinted suspiciously. “What did you—” He cut himself off with an exasperated groan. “Oh, come _on, _man. Your priorities are so screwed.”

Bill sniggered, balancing his quarry—a pair of sleek black sunglasses—on one fingertip. “Pssh, _‘priorities.’ _Careful, Pine Tree, YOUR HUMAN IS SHOWING!” He slipped the plastic sunglasses off and replaced them with his new pair, deftly enough that Dipper caught only the barest glimpse of his eye. He unceremoniously tossed the Glitter Gurl sunglasses at Dipper. “Here, I’m sure the CIA’s been missing these. THOSE DETAINEES AREN’T GOING TO TORTURE THEMSELVES!”

“ . . . These are my sister’s.”

Bill snorted derisively. “Oh, she _would.”_

“What were you just saying about making assumptions?” said Dipper as they began the trek back to the car. In their rush to ditch the cops, they’d overshot it by several blocks. The corner of his lips twitched upwards as he added, “And, hey, couldn’t you just wear a monocle?”

“Ah, yes, good thinking, PT,” Bill said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “That’s _much _less conspicuous! It’s not like having one eye is my PERSONAL BRAND or anything.”

“You know, personal brands being a demon thing would actually explain a lot.” Dipper straightened up as an idea struck him, turning to Bill. “Wait, but I thought you couldn’t be harmed. How’d you lose the eye, then?”

Bill’s expression was hard to read behind his sunglasses, but his smile didn’t waver. “That’s for me to know, and you to BROOD OBSESSIVLEY OVER! After all, a magician can’t reveal _all _his secrets. Not in ONE AFTERNOON, anyways!”

_Huh. _“I just don’t see how something like healing could be selective. Is it a biological process, or a conscious decision? But, hello, Dipper,” he said to himself, chuckling, “who would _choose _to lose an eye? It—”

“I said **_ENOUGH_**!” Bill snapped, voice echoing preternaturally loud off the storefronts. A few pedestrians turned to look. He took a steadying breath, then said, at a more normal volume, “If you were hoping for the exclusive rights to my biography, I’m afraid you’re outta luck. I sold ’em a couple centuries back to some guy—Adam Weishaupt-something-or-other. Boring mind. GREAT HAIR!”

Dipper made a noncommittal noise, but his mind was working furiously. On the one hand, it wasn’t like he’d expected Bill to tell him his whole life story—if the demon was being honest about his lifespan, Dipper probably wouldn’t be alive long enough to hear it all. On the other, considering the kinds of things Bill dropped in casual conversations, anything he wanted kept secret couldn’t be good news.

He massaged his temples. _This must be why Ford is so gruff all the time. Thinking about this is giving me a headache._

“—and then he went and got himself EXILED! Pfft. EMPIRICISTS, AM I RIGHT? ’Course, I coulda warned him, but they all spoke German over there, and I have standards!” 

Dipper blinked, snapping back to attention. “Huh? Germany? Wait, is that the car?”

“Well, technically, it was the Kingdom of Bavaria back then, but SAME DIFFERENCE!” Bill said, hopping up on the car’s hood, swinging his legs over the edge. “And yup. I was waiting for you to notice, but you never did.” He shot Dipper a bright smile. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a special kid, Pine Tree?”

“Every day,” Dipper muttered, opening the door and sliding into the driver’s seat. To Bill, he said offhandedly, “The local police are probably after us now, too. Just thought we should start keeping track.” He caught himself a moment later. When had they become a _we?_

Probably around the time he’d made a deal with Bill. _Duh, Dipper._

“Wow, look at you! Still in high school, and already on MULTIPLE WATCHLISTS!” Bill waggled a finger, shaking his head. “And they say millennials have no work ethic!”

“Guess I’ve just got a knack for it,” Dipper said, shrugging, then hesitated. “You don’t... _actually _think I’m on a watchlist, do you?” That would be... impressive. Also, terrifying.

Bill pulled his legs up to sit cross-legged on the hood. “Eh, probably not. Those extradimensional bootlickers are on more of a ‘POINT AND FETCH’ payroll. Though, hey, who knows? I hear they’re always looking for more target practice!”

“Well, that’s reassuring,” Dipper said, feeling relieved and—though he’d be the last to admit it—slightly disappointed. _I think I’m _plenty _threatening. Probably. _He looked up at Bill expectantly through the windshield. “Now, there’s milk in the back, and it’s going to expire if I don’t get it to a fridge soon. So, if you could just...”

Bill disappeared, then reappeared beside him in the passenger’s seat. This time, much to his own satisfaction, Dipper didn’t flinch. “Yanno, Pine Tree,” said Bill, arms folded nonchalantly behind his head, “I think this just might be the start of something great. Or—even better—MILDLY AMUSING!” 

Dipper felt the cool steel of the manacle through his pocket. It felt heavier than before—which was stupid. Even if it had been enchanted with weight-altering properties, none of them would work anymore. “Whatever you say, man.” _Stop being weird, _he told himself, gripping the steering wheel. “Now, buckle up. Driver gets to choose the level of road safety.”

“I know words in languages that would make your BRAIN STEM OSSIFY and your EYES DRIP OUT YOUR NOSE to ESCAPE THE AGONY of understanding them!”

“Huh. Cool. Seatbelt, please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i maybe got carried away with blubs and durland's dialogue, but they're just,,,, So Fun to write. also this is the last time the main event of a chapter will be bill and dipper running from the mall, i swear, probably


	5. And a Cross-Generational Turducken in a Pear Tree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ta-da, i'm not dead! sorry for the long wait, stuff got crazy for a while. this chapter's the longest one yet, though, so enjoy!!

Dipper stared down at his philosophy textbook, resolutely _not _freaking out. Like, not even a little bit.

He sat at his desk, leg bouncing with nervous energy. Today was Monday, and Monday meant school—which he usually didn’t mind. Was enthusiastic about, even! Education? The chance to broaden one’s mind? An escape from playing Russian roulette with the contents of the refrigerator while trying to make lunch? All things he could totally get behind.

But Bill... complicated things.

After explaining the concept of ‘school’ to Bill, the dream demon had burst into a several-minute-long laughing fit—during which Dipper had felt first annoyed, then deeply awkward, then annoyed again—seemingly amused by the idea that humans had to, in his words, “stew in their own body odour in order to hammer ‘information’—why yes, those _were _air quotes, thanks for noticing—into their fleshy heads.” Then Dipper had mentioned it involved both him and Mabel being out of the Shack for several hours at a time, and Bill had gotten a crafty gleam in his eye and said that maybe it’d do Dipper some good to socialize with his peers. At least, that was what Dipper assumed he’d meant. His exact phrasing had been, “Take some of that edge off.”

So. Now Dipper was worried.

Worried, but not freaking out. He’d already reached his allotted weekly quota of freak-outs; any more, and he’d have to start dropping quarters in the jar Ford kept by the basement door.

Honestly, he’d debated whether or showing up to school was worth it—_sorry I skipped, sir; I had to collude with an extradimensional entity _was basically a doctor’s note, right? –but, in the end, he’d come to the sinking realization that he probably couldn’t afford to cut. Being Ford’s apprentice was kind of a full-time job, and his attendance was spotty at best. In the weeks leading up to exams, he really didn’t want to be missing any in-class review days. Not that he was by any means struggling... but his apprenticeship meant he didn’t have time to do any at-home review, and while Ford had ensured he was leaps and bounds ahead of Grade 12-level math and science, his other courses had no such safety net. Though, come to think of it, Bill might have some choice thoughts to offer on philosophy...

“Earth to Mason,” said his teacher, suddenly right in front of him. Dipper started, snapping back in his seat as she arched an eyebrow. “You know, Mr. Pines, much as I appreciate this sudden interest in attendance, bringing your body to class only counts if your mind comes with it.” She peered closer at him, expression softening. “Are you feeling all right?”

Dipper didn’t think he looked _that _bad. Did he? Probably. “Yup! Just... stressed about exams. You know how it is! Guess you could say I’m entering a state of ontological stress, ha ha!” His smile felt slightly maniacal, even to him.

A line appeared between her eyebrows, but she returned his smile, albeit bemusedly. “That’s... not how you use that word,” she said gently. “But A+ for effort!” She headed past him, ticking names off the attendance sheet.

Dipper felt his entire body relax. He shook his head, righting himself in his seat. _Repeat after me: I will not use the all-knowing being in my house for homework help, _he told himself sternly._ Even if I really, really want to. _As he uncapped a pen, ready to take review notes, he resolved to focus only on school for the next few hours. After all, Bill was a hyper-powerful entity with physics-defying powers. He could handle Stan and a few off-season tourists for a few hours.

He’d be fine.

* * *

Bill was _amazing_.

Grunting softly, he dragged the bedraggled couch over to the wall. _Note to self: For a species whose muscles are basically just glorified skin, humans sure love to mass-produce heavy furniture! _He shoved the last chest of drawers out of the way, then straightened, admiring his handiwork.

He’d cleared one end of the storage room of furniture, a feat made easier by the fact that all the furniture had already been pushed to the very edges of the room and harder by the fact that wood was, apparently, stronger than this stupid body_. _It had taken the better part of... anywhere between a minute and three hours (adapting to linear time was still giving him the_ worst _jetlag), but he’d done it: The rectangle of afternoon light from the window now fell on bare hardwood. Chalk lines glimmered faintly against the wooden planks.

He brushed chalk dust off his hands and stepped forward, into the center of the circle. It was made up of intricate designs, all sharp angles and symbols that seemed to writhe and twist back on themselves, candles placed at the cardinal points. Its bleached lines spanned every free inch of floor. _Anyone who’ll tell you size doesn’t matter is trying to make themself feel better, _Bill thought, pleased. He’d drawn the circle from memory. It might be complex, but it was also the closest thing he had to a signature; he could’ve traced it in his sleep.

(Not that he’d need to ever again.)

Without thinking, Bill snapped his fingers, and small blue flames _fwoomed _into existence at the tips of the candles—then he stumbled, eye going wide as a burst of light-headedness rocked through him.

Right. The... complications.

Lighting the candles had only taken a drop from his reserves—even with one hand tied behind his back, he was far and beyond what any magically-inclined meatsack could ever hope to achieve—but there was a big difference between a drop from a full well and a drop from one that hadn’t been replenished since humans figured out how to smelt copper. Hence the magic circle.

While Bill maintained that ritual magic was for posers—either do a job yourself or twist someone’s arm to get them to do it for you, but don’t doodle on the floor and hope it’s feeling particularly special, right?—the circle would gather any ambient energy (and in a place as weird as this, he was practically steeping in it) and let him ration what was left of his reserves.

As though thinking had made it manifest, he became newly aware of the prickles of hunger inside him. Absently, he pressed his fingers into the base of his neck—then almost gasped at the fission of pleasure that raced down his spine to pool in the pit of his stomach.

He half lowered himself, half fell into a cross-legged position on the floor, heat rising to his cheeks. He squeezed his knees tight enough to hurt. _Focus. I need to... focus._

Concentrating only on taking measured breaths, not on how _good _that brief contact had felt, not on the part of his mind that mewled at him to _do it again_, Bill let his eye slide shut. He tried to empty his mind of anything beyond the blackness behind his eyelid; the focusing energy of the circle; the silence of the storage room.

Well. The _relative _silence.

He cracked his eye open, annoyance spiking in his blood. It had started up again—that stupid ringing noise. Mayhaps ‘started up again’ was too generous; it never really _went away, _per se. He just forgot about it.

Until he needed to focus on something. _Apparently._

Bill shoved back the sleeve of his shirt, glowering down at the manacle. It shone innocuously in the candlelight, runes bright against the white chalk. “D’you mind? _Some _of us are busy being sentient beings with actual lives and minds, you glorified bracelet,” he hissed at it.

Its humming in the back of his mind didn’t waver.

_Guess they just don’t make ’em like they used to, _he thought grumpily, tugging his sleeve back down. _Honestly, they should’ve left it at house arrest monitors. More bang for their buck, less headaches for me._

Well, no sense in wasting a perfectly good magic circle. _Hah! Perfectly good magic circle—that’s an oxymoron._ Bill took a calming breath, then concentrated again.

His mind slowly began to unspool, seeking out pathways, tracing possibilities out along the lines of the chalk circle. He came up against dead end after dead end, points his mind shied away from, but he pressed on, searching for a chink in the manacle’s—_There!_

Hah! Those Zphrmr jackoffs thought they could outsmart _Bill Cipher?_ He was going to enjoy stuffing their own children back inside them like a cross-generational Turducken. They really _were _idiots; after the first manacle had gone kaput on arrival, all he had to do was—

Attempting to enter the Mindscape felt a bit like attempting to projectile-vomit his intestines out.

Bill jerked backwards reflexively, landing on his back hard enough to shove the air from his lungs. He groaned, trying to curl into himself, but the room seemed to spin around him. Amid the dizziness, his mind, bizarrely, seized on how numb his fingers had gone. He felt suddenly very far away from his body.

He was left staring up into the rafters, gasping for breath, feeling the hard wood of the floor under his back. He let his head fall back with a groan.

The manacle’s humming, if possible, took on a smug overtone.

* * *

Dipper liked to take pleasure in the small things. Like the fact that the Shack appeared to still be standing.

He walked up the gravel driveway to the porch, holding his breath as he pushed the front door open. He stepped inside the foyer, shifting his backpack to the other shoulder and doing a slow pivot, bracing himself for whatever he might find.

The gift shop, though slightly less goo-covered than on the weekend, was still a mess. Someone had hung a sign from a crooked shelf, and Dipper winced as he read it: **BEWARE THE TEENAGER THAT DID THIS!!! **The broken glass had been swept up into a neat pile, placed near a stack of pamphlets labelled _We’ll SHATTER your worldview!, _and marked as $10 per piece (_ask where these came from and receive a 200% price increase!!). _As Dipper strode further inside, he ducked around the blade of what looked to be a windmill with blinking LED diodes strapped to it.

Everything seemed... fine. _Disturbingly _fine.

His stomach growled, and Dipper wandered into the kitchen. Absentmindedly, he opened the fridge door—then immediately slammed it shut again, wrinkling his nose. He wasn’t entirely sure what that thing had been, other than beige and putrid-smelling. That was enough ambiguity for plausible deniability, right?

“Hello?” he called out, turning around. Mabel had made some excuse as he’d been leaving the school— “A club or something, totally fine, this is the face I make when things are normal”—so she wouldn’t be home until later. “Stan? Wendy? Soos?” He bit his lip. “...Great-Uncle Ford?”

No answer. The Shack seemed empty enough, so he risked adding, mostly to himself, “Ridiculously overdressed cosmic couch-surfer?”

“YOU RANG?” For a moment, Dipper thought that Bill had teleported again; then, as he twisted awkwardly around, trying not to bump anything with his backpack, he realized the dream demon was leaning against the doorframe, looking deliberately casual.

Dipper’s eyebrows raised. “Were you in your room this whole time?”

“That termite buffet isn’t ‘my’ anything,” Bill sniffed, lifting his chin.

“Oh my god, you totally were.” Dipper tried not to smile, but it was a funny visual—Bill Cipher, possibly the least relaxed person he’d ever met, staring at a wall for seven hours.

Bill jabbed a finger at Dipper. “You can’t prove anything,” he said—then his face paled with dawning realization. “Oh, stars_. _I _was. _I’ve become a... a _homebody.” _He turned his accusing gaze on Dipper. “Like YOU! Why didn’t you tell me that whatever you have is contagious?”

“Whoa, hey! There’s nothing wrong with being introverted. Or ...sitting in a room by yourself for seven hours. I mean, who _hasn’t _been there?”

“ME!” Bill splayed his palm flat against his chest, eye wide. “If I don’t do SOMETHING, and SOON, I’m gonna... uh... FINISH THAT SENTENCE! You’ve been warned!” He paused. “Nah, just kidding. I’ll probably just go on a destructive rampage until physically restrained.”

“Okay, okay,” Dipper said, raising his hands placatingly. Jeez, Bill seemed genuinely _upset _about that jab. He couldn’t be this bothered by cabin fever, could he? There had to be something else. For the first time, Dipper took in Bill’s rumpled collar and slightly mussed hair. The normally-composed demon looked... not great.

Just then, Dipper’s stomach rumbled again. He bit his lip, acutely aware of a saying about keeping business and pleasure separate, then asked, “You really want to go do something?”

“_ANYTHING. _There doesn’t even need to be a ritual killing! I’ll settle for manslaughter, the tofu of murder._”_

Dipper sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that. Well, I mean, not _that, _exactly, but come on.” He looked expectantly back at Bill, who was still standing in the doorway, head cocked. “I need an edible dinner, and you need... probably a Xanax, to be honest, but a hobby will have to do.”

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me twice!” Bill headed for the front door. “Staring at that wallpaper was NOT doing it for me! I mean, there’re the ’70s, and then there’s FLOWER POWER!”

Dipper caught his shoulder as Bill passed him. “You should probably keep your eye covered.” He gestured vaguely. “It’s ...y’know. Weird.”

Bill stared at him. Dipper found himself holding his breath_—moment of truth—_but then Bill huffed irritably and procured the glasses, seemingly from nowhere. “You said _beautiful _wrong,” he muttered, slipping the glasses on and following Dipper to the car.

* * *

Bill slid into the booth opposite Pine Tree, casting a glance around him. _Greasy’s Diner, _announced the sign mounted outside, and Bill experimentally smacked his lips. The steam from the kitchen left a salty tang at the back of his mouth.

The booth Pine Tree had selected was next to a window, and Bill turned his face towards the foggy glass. Through it, he could watch the sun sinking below the treeline, outlining the clouds in pinkish-gold. Pine trees cast long shadows like grasping fingers across the parking lot. Even though it wasn’t dark outside yet, the diner’s fluorescent lights hummed overhead.

Pine Tree picked up a menu and began to study it. Bill turned away from the window, one eyebrow cocked.

“So, how was school?” he crooned, leaning forwards, chin resting on his palms. “Quick, WHAT’S THREE TIMES THE SUMMATION OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT?”

Pine Tree glanced at him over the top of the menu, pointedly ignoring his question. “Do you think it’s too late to order pancakes?”

Bill shook his head sadly. “No, you’re supposed to say _nine.”_

Pine Tree frowned, momentarily drawn in despite himself. “Are you suggesting the summation of human achievement... is three?”

Bill chortled. “Well, it SURE ISN’T FOUR!”

“Whatever, man,” Pine Tree said, setting the menu off to the side. “So... What’s new with you? Kill anyone lately?”

“Oh, please. Whadda ya take me for, some run-of-the-mill shmoe? AS A TOTALLY UNRELATED SIDE NOTE, you should maybe steer clear of the living room for the next... oh, I’d say EIGHT TO TWELVE YEARS.”

Pine Tree made a face that said _I’m only eighty percent sure you’re joking. _He opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, an apron-wearing woman, eyelids caked with blue eyeshadow, appeared beside the table. Her nametag read LAZY SUSAN. “Welcome to Greasy’s Diner,” she intoned, gaze fixed on the pad of paper in her hands. “If you get salmonella from our breadsticks, just firmly remind yourself that that’s impossible and it should clear up. If not, cheer yourself by realizing you’ve taken yourself out of the gene pool and made our town stronger. Yay you! Can I take your—” She looked up from her notepad and cut herself off, a smile spreading across her face. “Oh, Dipper! Back again! And—What’s this?” Her eyes gleamed hungrily as she took in Bill. “You’ve brought another customer!”

“Name’s Bill Cipher! And I’ve gotta say, I’m amazed by how many customers you manage to pull in,” Bill said, flashing her a grin and extending a hand. “After all, you know what they say about location!”

She shook it, giggling. “Oh, stop it, you! You remind me of Stanley. Your great-uncle is _quite_ the charmer!” she said to Pine Tree. “When he isn’t trying to sell me off-brand dish soap as paint remover, that is.”

Pine Tree, who had been watching this whole interaction with a strange expression, winced. “Now _that _sounds like the Stan I know and am the legal ward of.”

“Speaking of your great-uncle...” Lazy Susan’s voice dropped sympathetically. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s doing great,” Pine Tree said, too quickly. His gaze flicked briefly to Bill. _“Really _great, in fact.”

Lazy Susan’s eyes turned sad, but she followed Pine Tree’s gaze to Bill and straightened up, clicking her pen. “Well, that’s always good to hear. Now, what can I get you two gentlemen? I should tell you that we’re experimenting with 45% milk.”

“Consider us warned!” Bill said cheerfully, narrowing his eye at Pine Tree, who had buried his nose back in the menu and was picking at a corner, studiously avoiding eye contact. _What was THAT about?_

“I think I’ll go for a... do you guys still do all-day breakfast?” asked the menu Pine Tree was hiding behind.

“Well, the little folk haven’t punished us for it yet!” Lazy Susan twirled her pen. “Guess that means the promotion is still on.”

“Cool. I’ll take a plate of pancakes, then.”

“Mm-hmm...” She scribbled something on her pad of paper, then looked up at Bill. “And for your charming friend?”

Bill laughed, until he realized she was serious. “Oh, DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME! I ate... a while ago.” True, it _had_ been a hot second since his last meal, but hey, what were a few millennia between food service workers?

Lazy Susan just shrugged at that. What, did Pine Tree bring all the pretty girls here? Bill resisted the urge to dip into her thoughts as she bustled off, his failure that afternoon still all-too fresh in his mind.

Pine Tree’s face was still buried behind the menu, but Bill thought he could sense an aura of accusation emanating from the beverage section. “What’s the matter, kid?” Bill asked, sitting forwards, tilting his head playfully. “Shapeshifter got your tongue?”

Pine Tree exhaled through his nose. “Really, Bill? Do you know how high the mortality rate is for food retail workers in this town?” He glanced at Bill over the top of the menu. “Life insurance companies consider working here a _risk factor_. Lazy Susan doesn’t need you being an ass to her.”

Bill winked at Lazy Susan, now off taking some other poor shmuck’s order. She tittered and waved back. “Well, SHE certainly doesn’t seem to mind!” 

“Gross, man. Seriously gross.” Pine Tree wrinkled his nose and shook his head, but he’d relaxed visibly, lowering the menu to the table.

“I mean, hey, if it makes you feel better, I can switch tracks to all the fascinating things you can do with fingers and meat tenderizers! All SIX HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE of them!”

Annnnd _there _was the caution Bill was used to, re-etching itself into the set of Pine Tree’s shoulders as he remembered what he was talking to. The kid’s newly-guarded expression sent an odd pang through Bill. He reminded himself to flay it into nonexistence later.

“Huh,” Pine Tree said noncommittally. “So... your end of the deal was that you’d help me out. Any advice?”

“BUY BITCOIN!” Bill said, kicking his feet up on the booth beside him. “It’s December 2017 SOMEWHERE, am I right?”

Pine Tree looked mildly confused. “..._Are _you right?”

“Annnd here you go!” Lazy Susan interrupted, thudding down a plate stacked with what Bill could only assume were pancakes before Pine Tree. “One order of pancakes. We definitely did _not _accidentally bake a small animal into that.” She gave an exaggerated wink. “That wink was complimentary!”

“Okaaay,” Pine Tree said as soon as Lazy Susan was safely out of earshot, poking the pancakes with his fork. “I’m definitely concerned that she felt the need to explain that.” He took a ginger bite, then shrugged and started wolfing down the rest, apparently too hungry to care about what had actually gone into the pancakes.

Bill watched, fascinated, as the food just kind of... _disappeared, _forkful by forkful_. _And he’d thought the kid couldn’t do magic!

After a few moments, Pine Tree glanced up and caught Bill staring at him. He paused, fork halfway to his mouth, taking in for the first time the empty space in front of Bill. “Oh, you didn’t order anything? And I’ve just been... eating this in front of you. In silence. For several minutes.” He pushed the plate towards Bill. “Here, do you want some? I haven’t touched that one.”

Bill was already shaking his head. “HARD PASS HERE, PT. This is more of a spectator sport.”

“C’mon, man. You’ve got to be hungry. There’s nothing in the Shack that should be eaten, even by extraplanar entities.”

Bill opened his mouth to refuse again—then hesitated. It probably wouldn’t work... but hey, no shame in trying, right? “Y’know what, kid? You’ve convinced me!” he said, folding his hands on the table. “Hit me with your flesh-fuel!”

Pine Tree grimaced. “Annnd there goes my appetite.”

Bill reached over to stab a piece of pancake with Pine Tree’s knife and popped it into his mouth. He chewed pensively for a moment, considering the weight of it on his tongue. Then he turned his head and spat it out.

“Dude!” Pine Tree exclaimed, dismayed. “You could’ve at least aimed for the napkin.”

“That,” Bill said calmly, “was _disgusting. _It’s so... soggy. And it doesn’t even taste like anything! It’s like trying to eat the embodiment of a CW show. WHAT A RIP-OFF!”

“Wait,” said Pine Tree, glancing away from the soggy wad of pancake on the floor to stare at Bill. “You couldn’t taste anything?”

“Does MY OWN DISAPPOINTMENT count?” Bill scowled. Ah, well. If nothing else, there was one less thing on his bucket list. “You meatsacks actually ENJOY that stuff? Talk about masochism!”

“Fascinating,” Pine Tree muttered. He’d procured a notebook from somewhere and was scribbling frenetically in it. “Have you considered that you might not have taste buds?”

“Aw, WRITING ABOUT ME IN YOUR TOP-SECRET DIARY? I didn’t know you cared!”

Pine Tree ignored him. “You can feel pain, right? So you must have nerve endings. Could you tell what temperature the pancake was?” Bill could make out the corner of a sketch in the notebook—he couldn’t see what it was, but something about the hurried pencil strokes prickled at the back of his mind. He tilted his head for a better look, but then Pine Tree leaned over the paper and it disappeared. “What if I put something in your mouth? Would you be able to feel it?”

Bill determinedly didn’t give himself time to picture that last one. He smirked, languidly slinking lower in the booth. “Jeez, Pine Tree, BUY A GUY DINNER first.”

Pine Tree flushed. “Unfortunately for the floor, I already tried that. Do you even eat?”

“Believe me, you wouldn’t either, if you knew what went into that stuff.” Bill shuddered. “_Two _types of fats? And don’t get me started on the water content! People don’t need that stuff!”

“Oh boy, I can’t wait until you find out about drinking,” Pine Tree said, shaking his head. He looked like he was about to press on—which would’ve ended badly for that face of his; a shame, it wasn’t half bad-looking—when Lazy Susan, like a lucky penny dropped from a skyrise at terminal velocity, materialized beside their booth.

“The check!” she declared, flourishing the paper. Pine Tree jumped and swept the notebook into his open backpack with his elbow.

“Sure, let me...” He patted down his pockets, then rummaged in his bag. “Oh, great. Hey, Bill, I left my wallet in the car. Could you get it for me?”

“For you, kid? Anything,” he said, lazily pushing off from the booth, barely catching the keys as Pine Tree tossed them to him. He shook his head in mock-disappointment. “Really, PT, that’s a crummy thing to do to someone with no depth perception.”

He ducked out of the diner before that could give Pine Tree any bright ideas, a bell above the door jangling. He headed across the parking lot at a saunter, hands in his pockets, enjoying the feeling of cool evening air in his lungs—honestly, enjoying the feeling of _anything _in his lungs. Of all the coiled-up human bits, they made a good case for his favourite. Flesh balloons that you had to keep full to avoid passing out? Sign him up! He kept meaning to try to fill them with other things. Maybe Pine Tree would buy him a milkshake to inhale.

He popped the car door open, and yup, just as Pine Tree had said, there it was: the wallet, lying on the driver’s seat. He scooped it up, chuckling to himself. Oh, to have an analog brain and constantly leave bits of himself lying around. _That _must get embarrassing at—

As Bill turned around, wallet in hand, the back of his neck prickled. He froze, staring into the forest.

Nothing but bushes. As was typical for a middle-of-nowhere town.

But still, for a moment there, silhouetted against the trees, he’d thought he saw—

No. It couldn’t be.

_Could it?_

Something cold began to unspool in the pit of his stomach. He stood there, grip tightening on the wallet as he weighed his options. He could leave. Get out of Dodge now, in one piece, and then keep getting out of consecutive Dodges until... until he found a way to get this idiotic manacle off and wreck shop. Ditch the kid. What did Pine Tree matter to him?

It would be so easy—like stealing candy from a diabetic baby, then fleeing the country. All he had to do was teleport away.

He didn’t do that.

Instead, he turned around and headed back into the diner. Wordlessly, he slumped back into the booth, sliding the wallet across the table to Pine Tree, who looked pleasantly surprised that Bill had returned at all, let alone with the thing he’d been asked to get.

“Oh, thanks, man,” Pine Tree said, taking the wallet. Bill shot him finger guns, ignoring the way his spine crawled. Suddenly, he wished their booth wasn’t so close to a window. Huh. Maybe he needed to shoot _himself _some finger guns.

Pine Tree counted out some change, then glanced up at Bill, a funny expression crossing his face. “Uh... what’re you doing?”

Bill dropped his hand, deciding that he wasn’t embarrassed. “MINDING MY OWN GODDAMN BUSINESS. You should try it sometime; it does WONDERS for the blood pressure!”

“Mmkay.” Pine Tree arched an eyebrow. “Because, from where I’m sitting, it looked like you were pointing a finger gun at your own chest.”

“Well, from where _I’m_ sitting, it looks like you have A WALLET FULL OF MINI-MES! Don’t get me wrong, I’M FLATTERED! But really, isn’t this moving a smidgeon fast? I mean, toting my merch around has to be at LEAST eleventh base!”

A fine line appeared between Pine Tree’s eyebrows. Then he sighed. “I know that you know that money is _not _merch of you.”

“Oh, shucks, I’m sure you’re right. You know how stuff randomly gets imprinted with your likeness? And then named after you, for some totally different, unrelated reason? YOU KNOW, THAT THING THAT DEFINITELY HAPPENS ALL THE TIME?”

“For the record, I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” Pine Tree informed him. “I can’t believe that I met a demon and all he told me was that money was his legal property.”

“Not true! I also told you to buy bitcoin.” He hesitated. “’Course, for the best of both worlds, you could always travel to India and then kick it because of Crohn’s, leaving $145 million in cryptocurrencies inaccessible to investors! That stuff’s COMEDY GOLD! But hey, all I’m sayin’ is, one of us predates the very concept of currency, and it sure isn’t the one who VOLUNTARILY wears a hat with foliage on it.”

Pine Tree somehow managed to look both offended and exasperated at the same time. “Now you’re just taking pot shots.”

“SURE AM! Oh, don’t look so glum, PT. Green really isn’t your colour! Plenty of room at the top of the pyramid scheme, live, laugh, love, yadda yadda.” He waved a dismissive hand. “You know how these things go. You look like you’re used to hearing meaningless platitudes all the time!” 

“This isn’t jealousy, this is maintaining a bare minimum of critical thinking.”

“Maybe one day, when politicians’re going around paying each other off with nice, crisp pine trees, you’ll understand.”

Pine Tree shook his head, slowly. “There is nothing about this I want to understand.”

“Your loss! Guess I’ll just...” Bill trailed off as Pine Tree focused on something over his head. “Hey, excuse me? I’m monologuing here. Sheesh, who do I have to kill to get a captive audience?” Huffing, Bill twisted around in his seat to see what had drawn Pine Tree’s attention. It was just a clunky wall-mounted TV, tuned to a news station, the volume cranked all the way up. Bill was _definitely _more interesting than some news anchor in a too-tight blazer.

“...never thought I’d actually say this, but thank you, Toby,” the announcer was saying. “In what appears to be an act of vandalism, the creatively-named Gravity Falls Power Plant has been broken in to. While it’s concerning that someone would want to deface such a prominent town fixture, this event only ranks a 0 on the Better Richter scale, which, for those who may have forgotten, is just like the regular Richter scale, but better.

“The power plant, which has been abandoned for some years now, is a holdover from the late Eustace ‘Huckabone’ Befufftlefumpter’s seventh term as mayor.” An image of a foreboding-looking cinderblock building surrounded by heavy machinery appeared in the corner of the screen. “The project, however, was never completed, likely due to the fact that Gravity Falls was removed from the power grid years ago. It truly is a miracle that our we still wake up with our phones charged. The source of the alleged break-in is still unknown, mostly because none of our interns are in good enough shape to hike up there. More on this story as it develops and/or consumes us all. In other news: The Northwests have bought yet another extra-carbon-emissions sports car. Stick around for the list of top ten people who wish that was them right now. Here’s a hint: Number one is you! I’m Shandra Hernandez, this is—shockingly—not Buzzfeed, and yes, it _has _been a slow news day.”

Bill scoffed. “Well, THOSE are two minutes I’m never getting—” He trailed off as he noticed the picture in the corner of the screen.

The photo was blurry and unfocused, as if it’d been taken from a phone camera while in a rush. Even so, there it was, at the edge of the trees, behind a swath of chain link fence: a smear of unearthly green light.

Pine Tree was already halfway to the door. Bill caught his wrist, and the kid twisted around to shoot him an annoyed look. “What is it?”

“I know how much you love sticking your nose in things,” said Bill, using his best see-I’m-reasonable voice, “but you heard the lady; there’re probably just some kids over there with green glowsticks shoved up their asses. How’s about we leave it to the cops? This seems MUCH more their speed.”

Pine Tree looked at him like he was crazy. “In this town? I’ll be lucky if it doesn’t threaten me into letting it freeload while it flees law enforcement.”

Touché. “Hey, at least I wasn’t gonna _kill _you! Probably.” Without his permission, Bill’s thoughts flew to the pale shadow in the woods. He forced them away.

“Ah-ha!” Pine Tree said triumphantly. “So you _do _think there’s something dangerous going on over there. I knew it!” He seemed, oddly, _more _motivated to investigate now that danger was potentially involved. _You’re a strange one, kid._

Bill opened his mouth, then paused, shaking his head. “You know what? Fine. You got a death wish, I’m more than happy to oblige you.”

“You always say the sweetest things,” Pine Tree said wryly.

“HAH! You’re just lucky watching you FLAIL AROUND LIKE A BABY is funnier than watching you die. Also like a baby.”

The couple at the booth behind them shot them a strange look.

* * *

Hands on his hips, Dipper stood looking up at a very large overhang of dirt.

The abandoned power plant hunkered on top of a mild hill. He (and Bill—he still wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about that development) had driven as far up to it as the winding dirt road allowed. The road, though, tapered off before what Dipper now stood in front of: A dirt overhang. Roots hung down from the dirt in a spindly, sun-bleached curtain that almost seemed to glow in the blue twilight. The tip of the power plant’s smokestack was just visible over the lip of the overhang.

Dipper took a pace back. “Well,” he said to Bill, “looks like we’ll have to climb.” Hesitating only long enough to check his backpack was looped over both shoulders—yes, he had dropped it before, and yes, Mabel _had _laughed at him—he grabbed a fistful of roots. The overhang wasn’t very tall, despite how it loomed overhead. Pulling himself up on the sturdier-looking roots and digging the toes of his sneakers into the ridge’s loose dirt, he managed to clamber to the top within a few seconds. The hardest part—making it over the lip—was no more difficult than one of those overhanging rock-climbing walls. With a grunt, he pulled himself over and onto the packed earth beyond.

Straightening up, brushing the dirt from himself, he peered back down at Bill. The dream demon was watching him, amused—Dipper could make out his expression because of the way his eye’s glow deflected off the sunglasses’ lenses and back onto his face. It bathed him in a kind of soft, ambient light. Like he had a sunlamp floating above his head. Ugh. “You coming?” he called, to distract himself from how _annoying _the sight was.

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, kid,” Bill called back up. “I know how your soul withers in my absence, but you’re a big boy! I’m sure you’ll manage.” He raised a hand, the fingers positioned as though to snap—then something unreadable flickered across his expression, and he lowered it again. He stepped up to the overhang, pensively tugging on a root. Loose dirt rained down on his shoulders.

A vague sense of _Hey, man, this isn’t going to be good_ stirred within Dipper. He sat forwards, saying, “Wait, are you—,” but apparently that was all the consideration Bill needed. The blond kicked the toe of one dress shoe into the ridge.

What followed next, even Dipper wasn’t entirely sure. Somehow, completely ignoring the roots and handholds, Bill succeeded in scrambling up the ridge. Only... _scrambling _wasn’t quite the right word for it. It was a kind of frenetic surge, carrying him most of the way to the overhang, where he halted, clinging to the shifting dirt a few feet below Dipper. Bill’s sunglasses had been knocked askew in the climb, and Dipper could see how wide his lambent eye had gone. Even he seemed surprised, like a cat that had scrambled up a tree and now found itself stuck at the top.

Biting back a snort, Dipper reached over the overhang, careful to keep his center of gravity low, and closed his hands around Bill’s forearms. He managed to haul Bill up onto solid ground, but the dream demon lost his balance and tipped over, knocking them both over and spilling across Dipper’s legs.

“What the heck was that?” said Dipper, staring straight up into the night sky. “Can’t you, like... fly?”

“Leave the thinking to your uncle,” Bill grumbled. Dipper realized, somewhat concerned, that Bill was... trembling? No, wait—his shoulders _were_ shaking, but from laughter. That was actually more worrying, but then Bill shifted, and Dipper became suddenly very aware of how warm Bill was, and how much he was still draped across Dipper’s legs. One of his hands rested between Dipper’s thighs.

Bill, blessedly, decided to stand up. Dipper clambered to his feet, feeling strangely flushed. He snuck a glance at Bill, who was examining his hand, the appendage illuminated by his eye.

Bill looked up at Dipper, grinning. “Hey, kid, I think I broke a finger!” Dipper couldn’t make out what he did next, but there was an audible _crack, _like a dry twig snapping. It was followed by a short pause. “Welp. It’s DEFINITELY broken now!” 

Instead of dealing with... any of that, Dipper turned away from the overhang. He and Bill stood at the edge of the forest, and through dark shapes of trees, he could see a chain link fence—and, beyond that, the abandoned power plant.

Imposing during the day, the power plant was downright ominous at night. A massive cinderblock complex, it loomed several times higher than the heavy machinery abandoned—seemingly mid-construction—around it. There were yellowing floodlights positioned around the perimeter, and the few still-functioning ones illuminated complex’s walls in random stretches. Its smokestack was a stark line against the moon. 

_What would want to come here? _On a hunch, Dipper cast his gaze down towards the car. From this vantage point, almost washed out in the moonlight, he could see what he’d missed when driving: Tire tracks, leading up to the dead end, then stopping.

There were no vehicles in sight.

Something niggled at the corner of Dipper’s mind. He’d never known a supernatural creature to drive—not even the Manotaurs, and they had both opposable thumbs and the capacity for road rage. Maybe a cult? Those usually had a thing for creepy-ass places, and this definitely qualified. They might also spring for a carpool.

_Geez, maybe Mabel’s right. Ford _is _rubbing off on me. _He was getting nervous when something _wasn’t _weird? Shaking away his misgivings, Dipper walked up to the chain link fence, then turned to Bill. “Okay. Yes or no question: Can you climb?”

Bill looked offended. “What? Of COURSE I can climb! Didn’t you see me climbing the pants off that dumb hill?”

“Well, then.” Dipper gestured to the fence. “Age before beauty.”

“I see you’ve decided to switch your ONE PERSONALITY TRAIT from ‘SWEATY’ to ‘SASSY.’ I think I speak for everyone you’ll ever know when I say: NOT A FAN!” But Bill hooked his fingers in the chain link and started to climb.

So it _wasn’t _electrified. Dipper had suspected as much, but better safe than sorry.

(It wasn’t like it would’ve killed Bill, one way or another. He’d probably _enjoy _it.)

Dipper dropped down next to Bill on the other side of the fence. Beyond their thin copse of trees loomed the power plant. Dipper crept to the edge of the forest, motioning for Bill to follow—Bill made a somewhat ruder motion in return—and headed towards the plant at a crouch.

Usually, when people told him a place was abandoned, they really meant ‘no one comes here anymore, except a horrifying monster and all twenty of its henchmen and also my grandmother on Sundays,’ but, surprisingly, the abandoned power plant did appear to be genuinely abandoned. Reaching out to pass his hand along the side of a crane, Dipper found its paint peeling, the metal pitted with rust.

Some creatures’ presence caused their surroundings to degrade. This wasn’t that, though; the rust was too even, not concentrated on the side closer to the source. Dipper frowned. Maybe there really wasn’t anything—

There was a figure in the crane.

He froze, flattening himself against the wall, heart pounding, until he saw that the person was slumped over their control panel. He let out a relieved breath. _Asleep._

_Asleep?_

He frowned again. Softly, he said, “This construction site has been shut down for years. There shouldn’t be anyone here.”

Bill’s head popped up from where he’d been kicking over spotlights. Standing in front of the light like this, his shadow stretched long across the scraggly grass. “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet about this whole trespassing thing, kid. Not that I care, but you’re designated driver. CAN’T HAVE YOU HAVING AN ETHICAL CRISIS ON THE JOB! Or we could, I guess. Might make things a smidge more interesting.”

“What? No, there’s a guy up there!” Dipper pointed, keeping his voice low. “See, he’s sleeping.”

Bill followed his finger, then shot Dipper a knowing look. “Ohhh, _that _guy. Sure. He’s ‘sleeping.’”

Dipper stared at him flatly. “Oh, nice one, man. Real nice. I suppose you’re gonna say he’s dead?”

“Recently, if it makes you feel any better!”

_Bill’s just messing with you, _Dipper told himself, turning away. But, at the same time... why would anyone be here? For a moment, he thought he saw something dark and glistening splattered across the crane’s window—_thanks, Bill, you asshole—_but his attention was caught by a flash of light.

He squinted, glad for a distraction. There it was again: A pulse of phosphorescent green, bright enough in the night to briefly throw the tips of the trees into stark relief. Another flash, and Dipper could tell it was emanating from the smokestack.

That was _definitely _weird. Oddly enough, he felt a rush of relief.

Sticking to patches of shadow, Dipper worked his way to the power plant’s metal double doors. At some point, they had been chained shut, but the chains were so weather worn that a solid shove sent them slithering to the ground, leaving the doors unbarred.

He grabbed the handles and pushed. The doors swung inwards.

Dipper was standing in the doorway of what, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be a large warehouse. Apparently, the interior of the power plant had never reached the same level of completion as its exterior—save for haphazard tangles of wiring, the place was completely empty. Identical doors lined the walls, leading deeper into the plant.

Sweeping his flashlight around the massive room revealed nothing but dust motes. Dipper walked along the edges of the room, his footsteps echoing loudly off the concrete walls, checking behind doors as he went. Nothing leapt out at him as particularly sinister. An empty room, an unfurnished room. A hallway that lead to an empty, unfurnished room.

He began to approach the far corner, then hesitated. He hadn’t found anything yet; what made him think he would? He should just move on. 

Dipper blinked and realized that, absorbed in his thoughts, he’d walked right past the corner. He turned back to it and was immediately drenched by a sense of futility. _Nothing there._

He shook his head, disappointed, as he edged in a random direction that just happened to be near the corner. Such a shame, wasting time on something that was _clearly _unimportant. No sense investigating further. Because of how terribly unimportant this was.

“Yup,” he said to himself, carefully sidestepping closer, “there sure isn’t anything—"

His hand shot out—and vanished. As soon as it did, Dipper’s mind cleared, and he found he could look at the cloak directly.

It appeared as a rippling in the air in front of him. The distortion was incredibly faint; if he hadn’t known what projected dissuasion felt like, he probably would’ve walked right past it. Which was, of course, the whole point of setting it up. There was something here that somebody didn’t want people to see.

Dipper waved his hand around inside of the distortion. Disconcertingly, the movement didn’t create more ripples. He could feel the hand like it was right there, but couldn’t see it—like phantom sensations from an amputated limb. He groped around for a moment, hoping nothing invisible decided to take a chunk out of his hand as he did so, then held his breath and stepped into the cloak.

As Ford had drilled into his head, that was always risky—_it’s like crossing the street, my boy; if you can’t look both ways, you’d better have an antivehicle cannon!—_but he emerged on the other side fine. Passing through the cloak felt like taking a regular step, but when Dipper opened his eyes, a ladder had appeared beside him, stretching up through a circular hole in the ceiling. _The smokestack? _Dipper wondered. The ladder looked recent; the dust around its legs had been disturbed. More than that, though, it looked _new. _Its chrome finish gleamed against the blackened cinderblock of the power plant.

Wait. The ladder really _was _glowing. Leaning closer, Dipper saw a fist-sized device attached to one of the lower rungs, diodes on its side shining an unnatural green. The colour of the flashes from outside.

Also, the colour of guns that had, very recently, done their damnedest to turn Dipper into a clump of random molecules.

Once upon a time, this would’ve been the time when Dipper turned straight around and called Ford or Mabel—or, heck, even Soos—to back him up, but... well, annoying as Bill could be, it was a relief to know he was there. Having a dream demon to back him up felt kind of like bringing a nuke to a knife fight. Or a nuke to a tea party. Or a nuke... anywhere, really.

Besides, in the face of gaining new information, Dipper’s sense of self-preservation paled. What were the Enforcement Officers doing here? Not in town, but _here, _specifically. Could this be bigger than just Bill? And where did they get such advanced technology?

Dipper was two steps up the ladder and deep in thought when Bill stuck his head through the cloak. Dipper was proud to say that he barely jumped—proof that people really _could _get used to anything.

Bill raised an eyebrow at the ladder. “I can’t believe you found this before me. Yeesh, I must be going senile! Or is it somatised? I can never remember all the ways human brains can break.”

“You’re not going senile,” said Dipper, squinting up what he was now certain was the smokestack. “Somatised, maybe. Can you step the rest of the way in? It’s weird talking to a floating head.”

“You don’t seem to have a problem talking to your politicians!” Bill sniggered, but he stepped the rest of the way into the cloak, body materializing underneath him as if by magic.

“Okay, first of all, the saying is _talking _head, not floating head, so that one doesn’t count,” Dipper said. “Second of all, we really don’t have time to establish a rapport right now, Bill. The Enforcement Officers are here.”

Even as he said it, it made more and more sense. He hadn’t felt any weirdness because there wasn’t any _to _feel. He’d bet anything that if he investigated those mysterious tire tracks, they would lead to cloaked vehicles.

Bill’s omnipresent grin slipped slightly. “And lemme guess. You aren’t on that ladder to change their lightbulbs.”

“Well, that’s a no-brainer. Have you _seen _the all the exposed wiring in this place? Honestly, I don’t know why every building in this town has to violate OSHA guidelines—_Of course _I’m not up here to change lightbulbs,” Dipper said, exasperated, at Bill’s look. “I’m here to figure out what they’re doing here.”

“You already _know _what they’re doing here!” Bill snapped. “Does ‘recreational dream demon hunting’ do it for you? No? How’s about ‘liquifying all your bones and using you as a skin sock, then wiping your dumb family off the map’?”

Dipper, in response, began to climb the ladder.

He could hear Bill give a long, low growl from the base of the ladder. “You know, kid, this stopped being endearing about three hours ago!” he called up, irritated.

Dipper rolled his eyes. Okay, so yes, he was purposefully being a bit more difficult than usual—but Bill was getting the better end of their deal, and, now that Dipper was reasonably sure Bill wasn’t going to set him on fire, he figured it was time to set some boundaries. Boundary number one: he wasn’t going to kowtow to Bill. Dipper had things he needed to do. Bill could either grow up or suck it up.

(That didn’t mean he _couldn’t _still set Dipper on fire, technically speaking, but Dipper was testing out that positive thinking that always seemed to work out for Mabel.)

As Dipper climbed higher, the smokestack feeling a bit like a scaled-down subway tunnel turned on its side, the air changed. He could feel a faint breeze on his face, mingling with something that smelled like... ozone? He frowned, but kept climbing, the cinderblock passage narrowing around him.

Just as he thought the passage would close around him and he’d have to turn around, he caught a glimmer of light—an opening. Dipper pulled himself through, and his breath caught.

Getting to his feet, he found himself standing on a perforated metal platform that ringed the outside of the smokestack, open to the air. He drifted over to the railing in a daze. From this high, Gravity Falls was a warm patch of light glimmering in a sea of dark trees. Transmission towers stood out above the treeline, evenly-spaced lattices against the dark blue sky.

The peak of the smokestack was only a few meters above Dipper—and it had, indeed, been altered. Someone had cobbled rods and supports together overtop it, fixed over the cinderblock like a metal exoskeleton. With a thin antenna extending into the sky, the construct resembled a cell tower of some kind. Weirder still, thick, heavy-duty electrical wires looped from the metal struts of the construct to the nearest transmission tower. This close, a persistent, low-level humming buzzed in his eardrums and skull—electricity, Dipper was pretty sure.

As he stared, the antenna flared an acerbic green. Momentarily blinded, Dipper squeezed his eyes shut... and heard something.

He strained his ears, trying to muffle his footsteps on the metal as he crept around the side of the smokestack. There it was, carried to him on the wind, soft but unmistakable: a voice. Accompanied by... a clanging sound? Dipper pressed himself back against the smokestack to listen.

“—credibly unprofessional,” the voice was muttering. It sounded human enough, though Dipper only caught about every third word. _Clang. _“ ...thanks you get?... like all the others...” _Clang._ “...should just... orders to terminate...” _Clang. _That sounded like the striking of metal on metal. “...get a PhD, oh, sure, it’ll open all _kinds _of doors for you, like, say, the honour of installing a glorified FM radio in the middle of the night for—”

The voice abruptly cut off. Dipper realized he’d leaned forward in his eager to hear, and moved to duck back, but it was too late. His gaze met that of a welder’s mask-wearing woman, crouching on the platform, a wrench in one hand. He couldn’t make out her face beneath the mask, but he thought her eyes widened. She sucked in a sharp breath.

Dipper didn’t wait to see what she would do. He bolted, the flimsy platform shaking with his footfalls; around the smokestack, all but sliding down the ladder, dropping down onto the power plant’s main floor. He hesitated, then, on a whim, snatched the glowing device from the base of the ladder, stuffing it into his backpack. The cloak collapsed around him. He gave the ladder a couple of solid kicks—_sorry, Roof Lady, but it sounds like you hate your job, so maybe getting you fired is a good thing—_but it stubbornly insisted on being well-constructed and refused to fall over.

“_Bill,” _Dipper hissed, glancing frantically around him. This was the _worst _time to lose track of his... whatever-Bill-was. “Oh, come on, Bill, don’t be petty and give me the silent treatment right now. Bi—”

“That’s A LOOSE APPROXIMATION OF MY TRUE NAME, don’t wear it out!” Bill said, appearing from the shadows like—actually, no, wait, he’d just walked in through the door. Dipper was so accustomed to the dramatic entrances that anything else felt anticlimactic. Bill studied Dipper, his usual grin more cutting than usual. “What, need your diaper changed already?”

“No time to establish a rapport now, Bill,” Dipper said, hurrying towards the entrance. “The Enforcement Officers know we’re here.”

Bill stopped dead in the middle of the main floor. “Well, gee-golly-whilickers,” he said, hands playfully on his hips. “How ever did that happen? Now there’s a mystery for you to solve, Mr. Ghostbuster! Wanna here my take?” His voice was growing steadily more biting. “Some dumbass meatsack with too much free time and too few friends inherited two idiot chromosomes from his parents, then got it into his thick skull to play detective! Pin _that _to your corkboard!”

Dipper wheeled on Bill. “Okay, what is your problem? Leave my family out of this. Why can’t you just react to _anything _like a normal person?”

“Oh, of course!” Bill smacked the side of his head, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Whoopsies, did I hurt your _feewings? _Must’ve forgotten the most crucial tenet of demonhood: PROMISING TO SHARE AND DO MY BEST.”

“Being a demon doesn’t give you a free pass to be a _dick.”_

“Uh-oh, Pine Tree said a _bad word.” _Bill clasped his hands, batting his eye. “And, spoiler alert, it gives me a free pass to do WHATEVER I WANT._”_

Dipper was about to tell him where he could shove his free pass when he froze. “Wait, do you hear that?” he asked, cocking his head.

“What, your increasingly annoying voice? ’Fraid s—"

Dipper clapped a hand over Bill’s mouth. “No, I’m serious. Shut up for three seconds and _listen.”_

Bill grumbled against his hand—and geez, that kind of tickled—but fell silent. In the quiet, Dipper could clearly hear it: heavy footfalls outside the main entrance.

_You know, _he thought, the urgency of the situation rushing back to him,_ I should really consider taking my own advice one of these days._

The two of them were still standing in the middle of the main floor, in plain sight of anyone who was about to come through that entrance. Dipper looked to Bill, eyes wide, argument forgotten. “Do something!” he urged. “Use your demon magic, or whatever!”

Something that looked almost like fear flitted across Bill’s face. Instead of teleporting them away or magically repairing the chains on the door, he glanced over his shoulder, then grabbed Dipper’s hand and ducked inside the door nearest them—one of the many leading into the bowls of the plant—slamming the door shut behind them and sealing them in almost complete darkness.

Overcoming his surprise, Dipper yanked his arm away from Bill. He leaned against the closed door to listen.

There was a loud banging sound—the main door being thrown off their hinges—followed by a clattering of footsteps. Dipper held his breath as they approached.

“The prisoner was definitely here,” he heard someone official-sounding say. “Be on the lookout for ridiculously childish bickering.”

What? Their bickering was _not..._ well, okay, it was pretty childish. Especially considering the circumstances. Dipper couldn’t fault the shady government guys that.

The person finished their order with, “Check them all, if need be.” There was a chorus of _Yes, sir!_’s, and then another thunder of boots.

_Check them all._

Uh-oh.

Dipper stumbled back from the door as bootsteps approached. The handle—rusty, squeaky, in dire need of some WD-40—turned slowly, like something from a horror movie. The door swung open.

An officer stood in the doorway, gun in their hands, weak moonlight spilling in around them. That would be more than enough light to see Dipper, frozen in place a few feet from the door. From here, their armour looked like carapace, dark and glossy.

The officer swivelled, slowly, just like they’d turned the door handle. No hurry. They surveyed the room inscrutably from behind their black visor.

_They must have seen me by now, _Dipper thought, heart pumping._ Two steps forwards, and they’ll run into me. _He was close enough to practically look down the barrel of their gun.

But the officer’s gaze passed right over Dipper, over Bill, skipping over them as though they were nothing more interesting than piles of wires. After another few heart-stopping minutes, they turned and left, calling out a _Clear! _The door snicked shut behind them.

Dipper let out a shaky breath, raking a hand through his hair. He only now, after having the door opened, realized how odd the darkness of the room was. Bill must have had his eye squeezed shut.

Speaking of Bill, he straightened up beside Dipper, one hand on the wall. In the half-light, he looked strangely pale, as though he might fall over. Dipper frowned. It had been a close call, but Bill had hidden them from the officer. What was up with him now?

No one came back to check on them, and Dipper took a few large steps away from the door, just to be safe, then said, “I think we’re in the—"

Disorienting light spilled back into the room, but from the wrong end. There was a _click—_the unmistakable sound of a safety being switched off. “I would freeze, if I were you,” said a cool voice from behind him.

Dipper turned around, sweat trickling down his spine. In the renewed light, he could see the room he and Bill were standing in wasn’t a room at all, but a short, unlit hallway, wires dangling from pits in the ceiling where electrical lights had clearly been meant to be installed. There was an identical door at that end. An Enforcement Officer stood in that doorway, gun levelled. Straight at Dipper.

Dipper had a flashback to that first day at the mall, and thought, mildly, _Well, this is MUCH worse. _He was learning all kinds of new things this week. Like how much more terrifying being shot at point-blank range was than being shot the regular, respectable way.

As Dipper turned around, something changed in the officer’s posture. If he didn’t know better, he would have been tempted to call it recognition. “I said _freeze,” _the officer repeated, cocking their gun, and before Dipper could react, the wall beside his head exploded in a spray of debris. He flinched, numbness washing through him—before he realized that the shot hadn’t actually hit him.

Had an Enforcement Officer shot him from point-blank range... and missed?

Dipper’s hands shot into the air, cuts on his face from the shrapnel stinging. “Don’t shoot me!” he yelped. He made brief eye contact with Bill, trying to project _go along with this_. “I don’t know what’s going on! This crazy person just showed up and demanded I do what he said or he’d—uh—”

Bill’s eyebrows raised, but he pushed off the wall and now stood straight, his momentary whatever-it-had-been gone without a trace. “Or I’d make balloon animals out of his organs while they were still inside him!” he supplied, a bit too gleefully.

“Yeah, that!” Dipper turned pleading eyes on the officer, praying that they were from a dimension without police brutality. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him or who he thinks he is, but please don’t let him hurt me!” He side-eyed Bill. “I don’t want to be killed by someone who dresses like a male escort from the 1800s!”

Bill’s eye flared. “That just might be the third dumbest thing I’ve heard you say today, kid!”

“Well, that can’t be true; that would mean you were actually _listening_ to me.”

Bill shrugged. “What can I say? You’re not exactly difficult to figure out.”

“Prisoner Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero-Two,” the officer interjected, perhaps trying to wrest back control of the situation. “You have committed crimes against the multiverse. You have no rights and your life is forfeit. Speak now and your tongue will be ripped from your mouth and secured like the weapon of mass destruction it is.” They hesitated. “Now. Which one of you is Prisoner Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero-Two?”

Bill surreptitiously pushed his sunglasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Yeesh. Suits. GIVE ’EM A SIMILE AND THEY’LL TAKE A MILE.” He raised his voice to address the officer. “Someone should secure _your _tongue, pal, so you can never inflict that train wreck of a sentence on anyone again!” When the officer levelled their gun at him, Bill smirked, looking so infuriatingly smug it almost made Dipper nostalgic for their argument five minutes ago. “Go right on ahead,” he said, spreading his arms enticingly. “See what happens. Ooh, bonus points if you can take out the other eye!”

The officer didn’t lower their gun. “See what happens?” they repeated. “What will happen?”

Bill shrugged again, indifferent or doing a good impression of it. “What am I supposed to be, some kinda ALL-KNOWING SUPERBEING? All I know is it’ll be HI-LARIOUS! Well, not to whoever has to scrape your goo off the walls, but I’m sure your buddies’ll get a good kick out of it.” He snickered. “It’s funny because NO ONE IN YOUR LIFE CARES ABOUT YOU AS A PERSON!”

“He’s telling the truth!” Dipper chimed in from the sidelines. “About the secret weapon thing, I mean. I’m sure you’re a _great _person and lots of people care about you, man. People you haven’t shot.” At that, the officer turned back to Bill, possibly concluding—wisely—that Dipper was not as big a threat as a maniacal demon. Which was too bad. After Bill's whole nobody-loves-you spiel, he was going to feel bad about what he was about to do.

During the conversation, Dipper had managed to work his way around the perimeter of the hallway, so that he now stood almost directly behind the officer. As they turned to Bill, they put their back to Dipper, and he seized the opportunity. He whipped his trusty taser out of his back pocket and jammed the prongs against the strip of exposed skin between their collar and helmet, holding down the button.

He’d been a bit worried that the taser might not work on them, but nope. Turned out what would incapacitate a demon would incapacitate pretty much anything. (It had crossed Dipper’s mind before that perhaps Ford had souped up the weapon. The thought usually left him with a warm feeling.)

The officer spasmed as electricity coursed through them, their gun still clenched in a rigid hand. Then they collapsed to the floor in a jumble of limbs, head hitting the concrete floor with a dull _thud_. Dipper winced. At least... they’d been wearing a helmet? He knelt and felt for a pulse.

When he felt one, he let out a long breath. Sure, he’d tasered Bill, but that’d been different. Bill had deserved it; this person was just trying to apprehend a criminal. Plus, Bill was functionally immortal.

Although, they _had _fired at him. Huh. Maybe they had a police brutality problem. That made him feel a little better about rendering them unconscious on the floor of an abandoned power plant.

He sat back on his heels, raising his eyebrows at Bill. “Was ‘vague, unnamed threat’ really all you could think of?”

“Hey, this isn’t exactly an improv class (and THANK THE STARS for THAT)! Besides, you weren’t exactly Mr. Originality, either,” countered Bill, gesturing to the crumpled form of the officer. “Trigger-happy much?”

“What? C’mon, you were sending out major ‘taser this person before they shoot us’ vibes.”

“Guess I’ll add ‘READING THE ROOM’ to the list of things you’re terrible at! Fun fact: Numbers one through five are just the word ‘existing’ in different fonts. NUMBER FOUR’S IN COMIC SANS! That one’s my personal favourite.”

Dipper levelled him with a flat stare. “Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind tasering _one_ more person.”

Bill rolled his eye, arms folded across his chest. “Yeesh, if you’re gonna keep bringing that up, you can at least gimme a punch card I can fill out or something.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Now, whaddya say about blowing this popsicle stand?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” The blood drained from Dipper’s face, and he smacked the heel of his palm against his forehead. “Oh, shit, this is private property. My car’s _totally _been towed.”

“Guess there really _is _a god,” Bill muttered under his breath. Dipper contemplated picking up the fallen guard’s gun. For... evidence purposes.

There was a muffled frenzy of activity on the floors above them as officers flocked to the stairwells, reminding Dipper of where they were. That low humming had started up again.

On second thought, maybe he’d just focus on getting out of here. As quickly as possible. After all, he had one hell of a journal entry to write.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally, the plot is really getting moving. a huge thanks to everyone who's commented and left kudos!! they fuel my writing <3


	6. Welcome to the Bunker, I Guess. It's Still Not a Sex Dungeon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not sure how good this chapter is but it's past midnight and the quarantine has me losing my mind, and i'm worried that if i stare at this any longer i'll go insane

Being a demon came with certain... expectations. The first being, naturally, that you’d never fulfill people’s expectations of you.

And maybe that was a paradox—Bill didn’t particularly care either way—but what it boiled down to was this: Bill was used to turning deals back on people. They’d be all like, “Wait a sec, Bill, this isn’t what we agreed on!" and then he’d make a _super _original crack about reading the fine print, and then they’d be like, "You fiend!" and then he’d be like, "Why, thank you! And to think, this was all made possible by the abandonment issues your parents’ divorce left you with!” And then he’d double the number of their bones, or something. And then they’d start crying. Or something.

(He didn’t like to overthink his responses. It was better, in the words of an improv coach he’d once possessed and then vaporized, to let these things develop organically, in the moment.)

Point being: However the minutia went down, screwing people over was usually good for a barrel of laughs. Now, though, Bill was getting a taste of his own medicine.

Turned out, his medicine tasted like mind-crushing monotony. Who’da thunk it?

Bill growled, slamming his fist down on the nightstand, then hissed as warm pain bloomed in his palm. Annnd those would be the splinters. Hand still resting on the nightstand, he let a trace of—finite, all-too-precious—energy trickle down his arm, healing the cuts with a slight sting.

Pain hadn’t lost its shine. The someone-stepping-on-his-grave shiver of his reserves shrinking, though... that was starting to get old. Fast.

After the power plant incident, Bill had been feeling good. Relatively speaking. The idiots over at Zphrmr were wasting their time installing the multiverse’s most hack-job-looking Wi-Fi router, after all! Plus, Pine Tree had gotten an up-close and personal look at what they passed off as technology for his diary, and honestly, Bill had thought the kid was going to faint, or cream his pants, or start spontaneously bleeding from his eyes. (Bill couldn’t remember which one of those was for happiness. He had a good feeling about the bleeding eyes one, though.) It was a classic win-win situation!

Except no. Because screw him, apparently.

Pine Tree had barely said two words to Bill before shutting him back in the storage room. And those two words had been, ‘Goodnight, Bill,’ so they didn’t really count. Because Bill had _not _had a good night, thank you very much. He’d had a boring night, which had bled into a boring day, which had melted into a kind of mind-numbing drone.

Normally he’d have welcomed the spare time, but the memory of the pale shadow outside the diner was enough to keep him from sneaking out again. Bill was many things, but an idiot wasn’t one of them. He could feel the wardings around the Shack thrumming in the manacle encircling his wrist, as though it was trying to absorb that magic, too, the greedy inanimate object. He’d take holing up in the Shack under layers upon layers—upon layers upon layers; someone was _seriously _paranoid—of protection over bareknuckling it out in the middle of nowhere any day.

That, however, still left him with nothing to do.

Bill might have been a being of pure energy, but there were only so many times he could rearrange the same nine pieces of furniture before he lost it. It wasn’t like the kid had left him some magazines, or anything.

Bill gritted his teeth, face heating up. Obviously, Pine Tree had forgotten about him—because he had _sooo _much going on in his stupid life, with his stupid shapeshifter, and y’know what, Bill didn’t even care! So what if he’d been trapped in here? He could leave if he really wanted to!

In fact, Bill thought he’d go do that right now; give Pine Tree a piece of his mind, or maybe introduce himself to that idiot sister of his. He snickered, thinking of it. It wasn’t like he’d do any damage. Nothing _permanent_, anyway. His hand closed on the doorknob.

It didn’t turn.

He backed up, breath coming quicker. Finefine_fine, _he was a dream demon, he didn’t need doors. The way the walls seemed to close in didn’t matter. The cold, shuddery feeling in his chest didn’t matter. The fact that he was _locked in, he was trapped, he couldn’t escape he was going to stay here forever Pine Tree did this on purpose _didn’t matter. _NONE OF IT MATTERED._

He bumped into the window and whirled around, glaring at the boards covering it, eye itching. Voids, how he loathed them in that moment. He seized one of them, wrenching it out of the wall—and breaking it eased some of the pressure in his skull, so he tossed it to the side and grabbed the next one. Uncaring of the splinters digging into his hands, he ripped the boards off the window, one by one.

Too soon, he’d torn all the boards out, leaving them strewn across the room in various states of destruction. Feeling suddenly drained, Bill sank down against the wall with a shuddering breath, arms wrapping around his legs. Rivulets of blood dripped down his trembling fingers. He curled them into fists, ignoring the biting pain, shaken and furious at himself. His face burned with humiliation.

That hadn’t been like the other times. He hadn’t been trying to enter the Mindscape. He had just... freaked out.

Bill Cipher, creator of chaos, master of the mind, asshole supreme, did _not _freak out.

What was _wrong _with him?

* * *

Dipper staggered into the living room, blinking blearily. Last thing he remembered, he’d been forlornly staring down at a textbook, attempting to learn the entire French language in one sitting—then, just a few moments ago, he’d jolted awake at his desk. Something had woken him up, and even groggy, he knew to be on his toes. He _thought _Ford had left the protections on the Shack in place, but...

Hold on. There were voices drifting in through the front door. The door which, his tired brain slowly noticed, had been left ajar, blowing in a faint breeze. Dipper stepped out onto the porch, squinting against the mid-morning sunlight. As his eyes adjusted, he thought for a moment that he was still asleep.

Long, white plastic tables were laid out on the front lawn in quasi-rows, as though whoever had set them up had tried to keep them neat, then given up somewhere in the middle. Paper signs were taped to most of them, and people—a few that Dipper recognized from around town, and more that he didn’t—milled around, stopping to gawk and prod. But it was what was on display that grabbed Dipper’s attention.

The tables were absolutely heaped with equipment. _Ford’s _equipment.

Dipper stopped stock-still and almost collided with Toby Determined. “Oh, hello there!” said Toby brightly. “Beautiful late morning-slash-early afternoon for a garage sale, don’t you think? I skipped brunch with the manifestation of Prince’s hair circa-1987 for this, and I must say, I’m impressed! Your uncle really is the gift that keeps on regifting, huh?”

“Garage sale?” Dipper repeated faintly. He stepped up to the nearest table, transfixed, as if in a dream. Sure enough, there were all kinds of devices that he recognized—as well as a handful that he didn’t. There didn’t seem to be any organizational system at work; he spotted a solar-powered drone beside an EMP, healing patches lumped in with kill-you-super-painfully-and-probably-pretty-embarrassingly patches, and—

“Hey! That isn’t a toy!” he snapped, grabbing the memory gun away from a tourist who had been staring down the barrel, its business pointed directly at her face. She shot him a dirty look, but he glowered back, the gun held protectively to his chest, and she scurried off. Presumably to go molest more of his great-uncle’s stuff. Much as he wanted to, there was nothing he could do about that right now, so he turned away from the table, still holding the memory gun. He had to find Stan. His great-uncle would know what was going on.

He found Stan in the middle of the lawn, chatting enthusiastically with a man about a knife that appeared to have batteries strapped to it. “It’ll chop your fruit in a jiffy!” Stan was saying, dressed in his Mister Mystery suit and smiling his broad, _I-smell-money_ smile.

The man examined the knife, holding it dangerously close to his own eye. “And you say this will help me with electrical work?”

“It won’t _not _not help! Tell me, when you’re experiencing these ‘electrical issues’—and I think, between you and me, we can call them what they are: unionized strikes against us toaster-owning folks—have you ever tried adding _more _electricity?”

The man looked thoughtful. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t.”

“Well then, there’s your problem! See, when electrons are in a strike position, sometimes the best thing to do is to simply introduce other, university-age electrons to do their jobs for them until they back down. I mean, even particles have to eat eventually, right?”

The man shrugged, seeming convinced, and handed Stan a wad of cash before meandering away, already swinging his new knife around. Dipper felt his eye twitch. He stepped up to Stan, cutting in front of another tourist, this one with what appeared to be a piece of 23rd-century surveillance technology clutched to his chest.

“Hey!” the tourist protested. “I was here—”

Dipper pivoted and pointed the memory gun at him. The tourist gulped audibly, then scuttled off. Dipper turned back to Stan.

“Are you okay?” he asked his great-uncle. “I don’t know what’s going on or which one of Ford’s enemies set this up, but we need to get this under control. Have you seen Mabel?” His thoughts went briefly to Bill, still in the storage room, but no, he could take care of himself. Dipper had left him alone as a show of good faith, and he seemed to be doing fine.

Stan scratched the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “Your sister actually... made the signs.”

“No way,” said Dipper reflexively. “She wouldn’t sell us out.” At the same time, he racked his brain for the last time he’d seen her. When had it been? Yesterday she’d been out of the house before him; the day before, she hadn’t been feeling well, and the day before _that..._

Dread settled over his shoulders like cool silk. _I _knew _there was something I was forgetting, _he thought, agitated. _I’ve been so preoccupied with school and Bill and the shifter that I forgot to keep an eye on her, and now something’s happened to her. Something that forces her to... hand-make posters? Posters for... garage sales? _

Dipper paused, thoughts slowing, only now noticing how uncomfortable Stan looked. “Wait. What _are _you doing?” he asked his great-uncle. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You’re being coerced, right? And this is a stupid question, because some magic will prevent you from answering, and then I’ll have to go on some clearly-structured, episodic adventure to discover the truth. _Right_?”

“Dipper—”

It finally clicked in his groggy brain. “No,” said Dipper, shaking his head. “You aren’t—you wouldn’t...” He snatched the sign off a nearby table. Stan winced at the sound of ripping tape. “Five dollars?” Dipper read, incredulous. “For a quantum electric barrier enforcement—”

“It’s a piece of junk, kid,” Stan said, not unkindly. He gestured to the chaos around them. “When you strip off the fancy Latin prefixes, all these doodads are. It’s not like my ever-considerate brother left behind an instruction manual. Besides, Ford’s not getting any use out of them sitting around in the basement.”

“You don’t know that!” Dipper was aware of how his voice was rising desperately, but, well—_Stan didn’t know that._ “He’s coming back. I’ve almost caught the shifter—and Mabel’s helping, too, in, y’know, her own way—and once I do—”

“The shifter? Oh, _kid.” _Stan sighed, expression pained. “Ford can be a real ass sometimes, and neither of us are particularly good at this, but I just— You know none of this is your fault, right?” He gently pried the memory gun out of Dipper’s hand and set it on the table. A heavy hand came down on Dipper’s shoulder, and Stan looked him in the eyes, earnest. “Look. Maybe Ford will come back, maybe we won’t. But we can’t let our lives revolve around him. Your sister agrees with me. _That’s _why she helped with the signs.” His voice was gruff as he said, “We’re both worried about you, kid. This much stress inside your nerd brain can’t be good for you.”

Dipper pulled away from the touch. “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe _you.” _Humiliatingly, his voice was trembling. He took another step backwards. “I have to—go.” With some difficultly, he squared his shoulders, realizing as he did how true it was. He really _did _have to go. “Apparently, I have to be the responsible one _again _and stop random tourists from walking off with extradimensional IEDs and blowing themselves up and getting the Department of Defense all over us for the third summer in a row. So. I’ll go do that now.”

“Dipper, _wait,” _Stan called after him, but Dipper was already slipping away into the crowd, and tourists were pouring into the space he’d left, impatient to speak to Mr. Mystery about their once-in-a-lifetime purchases. The whirl of chatter had started up again. Dipper just heard Stan saying, “Why, yes, it _does _peel potatoes” from behind him as he shouldered his way to the edge of the bazaar.

Dipper made it to a deserted table near the fringes of the forest and slumped against it, taking a deep breath. He clenched his fingers in the tablecloth, mortification already beginning to tint his cheeks. He had no idea where any of that had come from. It was just... he’d seen Ford’s equipment laid out any other of the Shack’s worthless trinkets, and something brittle had shaken loose in his chest.

Suddenly, everything seemed much more permanent. That only made the lump in Dipper’s throat harder to swallow.

Because, though Stan had said it wasn’t Dipper’s fault, he hadn’t been there. His great-uncle had no idea how wrong he was.

“Hmm,” someone said from beside him. “It really is amazing what they can do with duct tape nowadays, isn’t it?”

Dipper spun around, instantly fully awake. A slender woman was leaning back against the table—how had she gotten that close without him hearing?—supported by her elbows, head tilted back to watch clouds drift across the sky. She was dressed in skinny jeans and a pristine white t-shirt, lips painted a dusky red, like a model’s idea of casual. She also, apparently, couldn’t read Dipper’s _currently having a minor crisis, be back soon _body language.

When he didn’t respond, the woman inclined her head to flash him a reassuring smile. “That was a joke,” she said. Her voice had a light accent he couldn’t place. “Some of these impedimenta are really quite impressive. My compliments to the engineer.” She held up the device she’d been prodding, examining it more closely—a forcefield generator the size of a USB drive.

“It’s not for sale,” said Dipper shortly, trying to broadcast _go away _without coming out and saying it. He wrinkled his nose. “If you still want to buy it, you can go ask my— ask Mr. Mystery. I’m sure he’ll be _more _than happy to talk your ear off.”

She chuckled softly, unoffended. “If it was an otoplasty I wanted, I’d be back at the office. No, I rather like my ears where they are, for the moment.” She pushed off from the table and faced him. “I just have a few questions.”

_An out-of-towner, then. _“The Shack was founded thirty years ago, and was not in violation of any zoning bylaws at the time of its construction; a cut of our profits goes towards supporting teens in need”—_me and Mabel, specifically—_“if a product has a REFUNDABLE sticker on it, it means absolutely nothing, my sister just had to use up her pack; and, while the washrooms _are _gender-neutral, they’re also not available to visitors.” He inhaled deeply. “Anything I didn’t cover?”

“Actually, yes. I’m looking for something a bit more... specific.” She leaned forward, posture turning intent. “Would you happen to know where it is?”

Dipper maintained his friendly expression through sheer force of will. _The customer is always right, _he told himself, _even when they want you to be a glorified Google Maps. _“Well, I do know the town pretty well. What are you looking for?”

“I’m not certain what it looks like, but trust me, I’ll know it when I see it.”

Dipper blinked, just waking up to how weird the conversation had turned. “I’m sorry?”

“I thought you might be able to help me,” she continued, as though he hadn’t spoken. “I’ve heard things. Oh, they’re mostly good, don’t worry.” She fixed him with her gaze. It was with a start that Dipper realized her eyes were a brown so rich it was almost black, and _glossy,_ in a way that, from Dipper’s experience, human eyes generally weren’t. “You’re quite the inquisitive young man, they say.”

Alarm bells went off in Dipper’s head. He’d initially taken the woman as yet another eccentric tourist, but... “What do you want?” he asked guardedly. “And don’t say it’s to buy something.”

She turned the forcefield generator over in her hands, studying it. “It will reoffend,” she said, at length. “They always do. In case you have some misplaced notion of change.”

Cautiously, Dipper asked, “_What_ will reoffend?”

She glanced up at him sharply. “Don’t play dumb.” Her gaze softened as she took in his face. “I don’t know where it is, but you do. I can see it in your face.”

Dipper’s mind flashed through all the things a nonhuman could be searching for as he attempted to morph his face into one less expressive. “If you could just tell me what you’re looking for,” he said, trying to project calm, “maybe I could help you.”

“Prisoner 00002.”

It took a moment for Dipper’s brain to process that. When it did, his heart leapt into his throat. “I—uhm—” He cleared his throat. “Uh, what’s that?”

“What did I say about playing dumb?” The woman sighed through her nose, eyes momentarily fluttering shut. “Look, Mason—”

He didn’t ask how she knew his name. “Dipper.”

“—Mason, I respect your ambition, but hear me when I say: you’re out of your league. And know you might not believe it right now, but I’m on your side. We’re the good people. We want to do what’s right. That’s why, when you lied, I didn’t snap your neck and force your family to watch before taking up the issue with them.” At Dipper’s horrified look, she offered him a small, apologetic smile. “Sound like anyone you know?”

_Yes. _“This conversation is over,” he informed her, with a bravado he didn’t feel. “Sorry, but my parents told me not to talk to strangers who threaten murder.”

She pursed her painted lips in displeasure. “Fine. If it has to be. But a warning?” She leaned in, voice dropping. “00002 is bad news. It’ll say whatever it needs to whoever needs to hear it. If you truly care—about anything or anyone—you’ll hand it over before anyone else dies.”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word over Bill’s?”

For the first time in their conversation, a raw, genuine emotion flashed across her face: disgust. “Bill? Is that what it’s calling itself nowadays?” She scoffed. “And, honestly, its _word? _Let me guess: It hasn’t so much as mentioned me.”

Dipper’s silence spoke volumes. She shook her head, demeanour melting back into that of a pained parent powerless to stop a child from making a mistake. “Tell me,” she said softly, “how much do you really know about _him_?”

Then she stepped away, voice turning brisk. “Now, consider this a... three-strikes-and-you’re-out system. This is your first. Cheers!” She tossed the forcefield generator to Dipper. It crinkled when his hands closed around it, and he opened his palms to see a slip of paper poking out of a seam in the metal casing, with what appeared to be a phone number scribbled across it.

He looked up at her questioningly, and she winked. “In case you hear anything.” She turned to leave, then paused to give him a once-over, eyebrows arched. “By the way, I love your outfit. Though I’m more of a nightshirt girl, myself.”

Reflexively, Dipper glanced down at himself—and flushed deep red. He was still wearing the pyjama pants and hoodie he’d fallen asleep in last night. Well, no matter how murderous and/or crazy, the woman was right about one thing: they _were _very nice pyjamas_._ When he looked back up, she was striding away; there was a flash of white fabric as she vanished around the side of the Shack, heading for the backyard. “Hey!” he called, hurrying after her. “What are you—”

He trailed off as he rounded the corner. The backyard was empty; so, for that matter, was the surrounding forest. There weren’t even any footprints in the sandy soil. The woman had just... disappeared. Like some kind of asshole ghost.

That was weird. But he’d seen weirder, and she’d said something about him having ‘three strikes,’ whatever _that _meant, so he decided he could put it on the backburner for now. More pressing were the things she’d said about Bill.

Dipper tried to tell himself that she was lying—that Bill was just the extraplanar version of a jaywalker, or maybe a petty thief, and all she wanted was to get inside his head. But the longer he let himself consider it, the worse the situation looked. _How much do you _really _know about him? _she’d said.

Bill never had told him what he’d done to get stuck in Zphrmr.

Dipper stood in the backyard a moment longer, listening to the wind rustle through the scraggly grass, shivering slightly in his pyjama pants, arms wrapped around himself. Clouds, still tinted pink from sunrise, drifted across the sky. The treetops bowed and swayed in an indiscernible rhythm.

“Tourists,” he finally muttered, shaking his head, as he trudged back towards the Shack.

* * *

Fist poised to knock on the closed door, Dipper hesitated outside of what he was beginning to think of as Bill’s room, unsure of what the etiquette was for demons. Bill would probably burst through the door uninvited. Or set it on fire. Or both. Dipper didn’t consider either of those particularly polite, so he settled on lightly rapping on the doorframe. When no one answered, he knocked again, somewhat harder. Still no response. He pressed his ear to the door.

When he couldn’t hear anything, he eased the door open—first a crack, then, worry worming its way into his heart, the rest of the way. As he pushed the open the door to Bill’s room, the first thing that struck him was that the lights were off. The second was that he could still see.

He stopped, one hand on the doorknob, squinting in the dim light, and took note of the off-white daylight streaming in from the window. Dust motes danced in its beam. It illuminated a section of the wooden floor, revealing strikingly rich ochre undertones. High-quality wood, left to darkness.

“You took the boards down,” he said from the doorway, a note of surprise in his voice.

Bill didn’t lift his head from where he was sprawled on the couch, staring straight up at the ceiling, expression flat. “They were cramping my style.”

“Huh.” Dipper bit the inside of his cheek, casting about for a tasteful way to phrase _How are you finding Earth? _and _Can we just get along, please? _and _Is there anybody I don’t know about that wants you dead?_

“You look like shit,” he heard himself say.

Bill turned his head minutely—just enough to shoot Dipper a scathing look. “And I see YOU’RE still alive. Though I hear that’s a temporary condition. Hahaha, fixed lifespans.” He lifted a hand, scrubbing it listlessly down his—completely deadpan—face. “I crack myself up.”

Dipper mentally kicked himself. “No, that’s not what I—” He paused, exhaling frustratedly. He’d be annoyed at Bill for twisting his words, but, thanks to his lacklustre social skills, no twisting had been necessary. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, MUCH better now that you’re here,” Bill said sarcastically. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that.”

Dipper bit back a snappish retort. He’d been willing to give Bill the benefit of the doubt, but this was reminding him why he’d tasered the demon in the first place; Bill was glowering at the rafters above Dipper’s head as though he’d like nothing more than for them to collapse onto him.

_Well, screw this. _“There are a few things I need cleared up,” he said, arms folded across his chest. If Bill wanted to be an asshole, fine, but he’d be an informative asshole. “And before you say you don’t have to answer, if my family comes to harm because of misinformation you allowed to propagate, I count that in violation of our deal.”

“Sheesh,” muttered Bill, gaze still trained on the ceiling, “‘misinformation you allowed to propagate’? Don’t have many hobbies, do you?”

Dipper gritted his teeth. “You think I’d be in here, talking to _you_, if I had anything else to—”

He cut himself off as it finally hit him: _Our deal. _Bill had asked for shelter, and Dipper had given it to him. What was the expression Bill had used? Caveat emptor? When Dipper had said goodnight—unthinkingly, because that was how to be polite to people who had just infiltrated a power plant with you—Bill must have remained in the room, bound by the constraints of the deal.

That woman... she’d referred to Bill as an _it. _That had made Dipper’s skin itch with irritation, yet he hadn’t noticed Bill being _trapped _in here for days—and even then, he’d needed her to remind him. His chest constricted to think about when he would have gotten around to checking on Bill on his own. _It’s a good thing he doesn’t have to eat, _he thought, half-seriously.

With a rush, Dipper deflated, all his righteous indignation evaporating, leaving behind a smaller, denser precipitate: guilt. He would be grumpy, too, if he had to sit in a dark, unfurnished room for days on end, waiting for some idiot to release him from a semantic prison. The thought made him wince. 

Yes, Bill was a demon, and, yes, he was a bit of a jerk, but he’d also been remarkably cooperative. He’d gone out with Dipper for _pancakes, _for crying out loud.

It wouldn’t kill him to start treating Bill like a person. Probably.

“Do you want to get out of here?” asked Dipper unexpectedly. Bill stirred on the couch, then stilled, as if willing himself not to react. “My great-uncle’s driving me crazy, and... I don’t know, maybe you’re happy to sit here, in which case, props to you, but I mean, you’re supposed to take puppies for walks to burn off energy so they don’t chew up your furniture—not that I’m comparing you to a dog! It’s just that you’re, um, a crazy demon person, and maybe you need... to do other things? Possibly?” He snapped his jaw shut to cut off his rambling, face flaming. _Oh, very smooth, Pines. Dumb, dumb, dumb—_

He stiffened as Bill sat up smoothly, regarding Dipper with a narrowed eye. “You’re here to take me for a walk so I don’t put toothmarks in your furniture.”

“It doesn’t have to be a walk!” Dipper said quickly. He rubbed the back of his neck. “But... basically?”

Bill weighed him a moment longer, then seemed to reach a decision and shrugged carelessly, swinging his legs off the edge of the couch. His entire bearing shifted from hostility to casual indifference, fast enough to be slightly disconcerting. “Eh, it’s not like I have other plans. My schedule’s pretty much free for the rest of eternity. Unless TB pulls through in 2112, I guess, but _ugh_, something about the guy just rubs me the wrong way. Probably the fact that he couldn’t keep a shirt on to save his MISERABLE, PUDGY LIFE, though it could also be that he’s been sticky for LITERALLY AS LONG AS THE CONCEPT OF TIME HAS EXISTED. Pretty sure it’s an act of calculated malice at this point!”

Bill slid off the couch, strolling out of the room, but paused in the doorway, peering at Dipper. Dipper pressed himself back against the door frame, determined to give Bill his personal space. Even if Bill had invaded his in the first place. And was radiating an enticing heat. And staring at Dipper, something calculating in his gaze, like he was considering someth— 

“Are you wearing pyjamas?”

Dipper blinked. “Um. Yes?” For some reason, it made him flush more coming from Bill than the lady—and, wait, did Bill just look him up and down appraisingly?

Well. They _were _very nice pyjamas.

Then Bill shook his head, chuckling, and Dipper let out a long breath, reassured that he’d imagined the glance. “So, where are we going, anyways?” Bill called over his shoulder as they headed down the hallway. Being out of his room seemed to be perking him up, and Dipper let the knot of guilt in his stomach loosen. “I should warn you, it’s gonna be hard to top the Diner of a Thousand Meals That All Taste Like Wet Cardboard (And Also That Waitress, Though, So It’s Not Totally a Lost Cause, I Guess)!”

“She has a name, you know,” Dipper said. Before Bill could interject, he added, “Which I will _not_ tell you, because I refuse to encourage this... whatever-it-is. She’s old enough to be your great-aunt.” He furrowed his brow. “Or are you old enough to be the architect of her family line? Either way, it’s weird. And _not _a good kind, if there even is a good kind.”

“Of course there’s a good kind of weird!” said Bill, slinging an arm across his shoulders, grinning broadly at the face Dipper made. “Aw, you can put that thing away, kid. No reason to be PEANUT BUTTER AND EYEBALL JELLY!” There was an expectant pause. “This is the part where I’d usually drench you in a horrifying cocktail of PEANUT BUTTER and THE JUICE THAT COMES OUT OF HUMAN EYEBALLS. So if you could just take a moment to imagine that. Vividly.”

Dipper ducked away from Bill’s arm. “Duly noted,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “There’s some stuff I have to do in the forest, so it’ll be a bit of a hike. If that’s not, you know, beneath your demonly self.”

“Pfft. If I didn’t associate with things that are beneath my ‘demonly self,’ YOU’D BE ONE BORED MEATSACK!” Dipper frowned. Now that Bill mentioned it, he supposed he _was _a couple inches shorter than the demon. Not that it mattered. Or anything.

“Great,” he said, straightening his back, for no particular reason. “So, are you good to head out?”

Bill arched an eyebrow. “_I’m _ready. You should probably slip into something a little less comfortable, though.”

Dipper glanced down at his pyjama bottoms. “Yeah. No, yeah, I should definitely go do that.” He winced. “Even though half the town is on my front lawn. And saw me like this. And no one I spoke to decided to tell me.”

Well, whatever. He’d been worse-dressed in public before.

They _were _very nice pyjamas.

* * *

The day was beginning to heat up, but out in the forest, under the canopies of old-growth trees, the air was still pleasantly cool. Light slanted through the leaves as Dipper slipped through patches of deep green shade. He paused on the crest of a slight rise, shoes sinking into a lush carpet of moss, one arm braced against the trunk of a nearby birch.

He tried to fill his mind with the sounds of the woods—the twittering of birds, the burbling of a nearby creek—and shove the rest of the morning firmly away. Right now, he didn’t want to think about Stan, or Ford, or picking sides, or that there were sides _to_ pick, or the fact that Mabel had apparently already chosen hers, and that maybe he had, too, without realizing it, and that his choice might not be the same as hers, and being in the forest helped with that. It always made him feel more alive.

_Snap. _“Whoops! Hey, Pine Tree, SOMEONE WHO IS NOT ME just broke off another one of this tree’s weird fingers.”

Paranormal creatures made him feel more alive, too. So this was kind of like a mental double-double.

“They’re not fingers, Bill,” he sighed, glancing over his shoulder. He made a point of keeping his voice low. “They’re branches, and you really, _really _don’t need to announce every time you break one of them off. I’m pretty sure the trees don’t care. It’s not like they can feel pain.”

Bill looked disappointed. “They _can’t? _Well, way to make this awkward, kid.” He cast the twig off to the side, shooting it a betrayed look. Dipper tried to sneak a glance at his wrist, but Bill’s sleeves weren’t rolled to the elbows today.

Paranoid thoughts stirred up by the woman at the garage sale still bounced around his skull, and he tried to cast his mind back. When had Bill started wearing his sleeves like that? Was it before or after Dipper had found that manacle at the mall, now secure (more or less; he supposed nothing was truly safe from the reach of Stan’s pocketbook) in the basement of the Shack? Did Bill’s fashion choices have some grand significance, or was Dipper just being weird? Was this line of thinking all a ploy to distract himself from familial stress?

He grimaced. _That’s... a bit too close to home. Little less self-awareness, please, internal monologue._

“So,” said Bill, breaking the self-revelatory silence, as well as another branch, and seriously, Dipper was starting to wonder if Bill had something against trees, “why’re we here? I’m getting dirt all over my shirt.”

Dipper glanced back again. Bill’s shirt was, as usual, pristine. He wasn’t sure if it was a demon thing or just a Bill thing, but either way, he had a bigger problem. “Shh, man. Besides, can’t you just”—he spread his fingers in a vague impression of sorcery—“magic yourself up another one?”

“Oh. Right.” Bill went quiet for a fraction of a second. “No, but really, Pine Tree, why’re you feeling up that tree? You know how many jokes I can get out of that? You’re just FUELLING THE FIRE HERE, kid!”

Dipper didn’t think _leaning against _was even remotely in the ballpark of _feeling up, _but he had a more pressing concern. _“Shhh,” _he hissed again, shooting the underbrush a nervous look. “Seriously, stop yelling. You’ll wake them up.”

“Pfft, wake what up?” Bill snapped off another branch with a grin, the _crack _loud enough to make Dipper wince. “I thought you said trees were too dumb to feel pain. Sheesh, kid, just pick a comforting lie or—”

A rumble went through the ground, rattling the leaves of a nearby bush imperceptibly. Dipper froze and glanced around at the foliage. Stillness. _Maybe it was nothing, _he found himself thinking, relaxing slightly. _That would be new. Maybe I imagined—_

A trumpeting roar ripped through the air, sending birds scattering, the flapping of their wings lost in the cacophony. This time, the leaves of the tallest trees shook.

“_That,” _Dipper shouted over the clamor. Bill stumbled to the side, eye wide, and Dipper pushed off from the tree, leaping over the tangle of roots at the tree’s base and grabbing the demon’s wrist. He tore off down the path, struggling to stay on his feet as another earth-shaking bellow boomed behind them.

Bill had found his legs now, running on his own. Dipper took a vindictive pleasure in how his face had paled. “What the _hell_, kid?” he yelled. Even shouting, Dipper could barely hear him over the bulldozer drone steadily growing louder behind them. “You couldn’t have mentioned that _earlier? _What even is that thing?”

“That,” Dipper yelled back, vaulting over a cluster of rocks, “is a numpty! They’re native to Britain, and usually peaceful—unless someone _shouts directly next to their head _while they’re sleeping!” 

“A numpty?” Bill was having considerably more trouble following Dipper’s lead. He kept trying to slow down and look over his shoulder, the golden idiot, which, as Dipper had discovered years ago, was fine and dandy until you ran off a cliff or smack into a tree. Or the person in front of you. _Oof. _“Those things are too dumb feed themselves, let alone eat something! Sheesh, you humans are so self-absorbed. Not everything wants a taste of your meatsacks, you know!”

A tree shuddered, then crashed soundlessly to the ground in front of them, noise swallowed up by the general din, its canopy shivering with the impact. Dipper had to switch tracks to avoid being clotheslined. “Not exactly worried about being eaten!” he called over his shoulder.

He tried to think as he ran. They couldn’t keep fleeing in a straight line; he couldn’t tell how far behind them the numpty was, only that it had to be gaining. The path stretched out in front of him, gravel quaking with the creature’s footfalls, but diverting around the fallen tree had gotten him turned around, and the forest loomed indistinguishably around him.

Birches flashed by on either side, and Dipper suddenly knew where they were. He half-leaped, half-threw himself off the path, hoping that Bill was paying enough attention to follow. Branches whipped his legs as he charged through the underbrush: around that pond, over that gully, and there, just ahead, visible through the trees—

He skidded to a halt, almost colliding with a towering pine. Its trunk made a metallic clank as his shoulder slammed into it, and he pulled back, feverishly sliding his fingers across the bark until he found the seam where rusting metal met wood, working the panel open. It swung outward, revealing a clunky control device, and he tugged the lever, bracing himself against the tree.

Bill, who had barely acclimated to the numpty’s footsteps, wasn’t so prepared. “Woah!” He stumbled backwards as the ground’s rumbling redoubled, clumps of dirt tumbling into the pit that opened just feet from him. Dipper held tight to the tree for balance. There was a ripping of grass and groaning of pneumatics, and then a spiral staircase unearthed itself from the hard-packed dirt, corkscrewing down into the darkness. 

Bill peered cautiously down into the pit, but Dipper didn’t give him time to appreciate it. He jumped onto the stairs’ first landing, yanking Bill with him, then shoved a lever built into the stairwell. There was a grinding of gears as the shaft closed back over, shutting them in blackness.

Dipper leaned back against the rough-hewn wall and panted, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. The sound echoed loud in the sudden silence. Hesitantly, he said, “I think it’s—”

There was a muffled thumping on the closed hatch, followed by a roar of frustration. Dipper instinctively covered his head, but the hatch held firm, barely shaking beneath the numpty’s weight. Dirt sifted down onto their shoulders.

He let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. “It can’t get in,” he said, more to reassure himself than Bill. He knew, intellectually, that Ford had built this place to withstand entry, but he’d never put it to the several-tonne test before.

The muted pounding continued, and Dipper straightened up. Standing like this, there were only a few inches of clearance between his head and the hatch. His spine prickled to think how close his face was to the numpty’s claws. To keep himself occupied as he edged over to the stairs, he said, “You’ve been suspiciously silent, Bill, which I’m choosing to assume is a testament to how much you want to hear what I have to say, rather than how much scheming you’re doing. Either way, watch your”—_THUD—_“head.”

Dipper shook his head—it was _not _a fond gesture, no matter how his lips curled up at the corners—and started down the stairs. After a moment, Bill followed, whistling to himself. “Damn, kid. You’d think you were full of surprises, but YOU’D BE SURPRISED!” His voice bounced off the walls of the pit as they descended. Dipper heard him rub his hands together expectantly. “So, what’re you gonna do? Bonk me over the head with a rolled-up newspaper? Spritz annoying amounts of holy water in my face? Lock me up and tell me I need to change my ways? Fair warning to you: BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, BOUGHT THE OVERPRICED T-SHIRT.”

Dipper furrowed his brow, focused on the steps in front of him. “You’re not wearing some kind of universal translator, are you? Because I’m pretty sure it’s malfunctioning.”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, this whole thing you’ve got going on here? PRETTY IMPRESSIVE! But, between the two of us, don’t you think sex dungeons in the middle of the forest are a little, ehh...” Bill seesawed his hand, tilting his head. “If I say ‘overused,’ does that reflect poorly on me?”

Dipper almost missed a step, hand flying out to steady himself against the wall. He’d forgotten how _dark _it was in here, once you got deep enough, and found himself wishing for a flashlight or his phone. “It’s not a sex dungeon! Jeez, why is that the first thing you thought of?” He really, really did not want to picture the bunker, _Ford’s _bunker, as a sex dungeon, oh no, and now that he’d thought about not thinking it he couldn’t stop thinking about it, no no _no. _This was not what he’d pictured when Bill talked about expanding his mind. He shook his head to clear it. “Also, none of the things you just listed are sex.”

Though Bill’s glowing eye was the only part of him Dipper could see, he could sense the demon shooting him his trademark knowing look. Dipper had found it irritating at first, but was beginning to suspect it that it meant absolutely nothing. “Your loss, kid!”

Dipper squinted into the inscrutable patch of darkness in front of him, trying to make out the next stair. _Bill doesn’t seem to be having any trouble. Damn, I should’ve made him go before me. _

Well, he’d been down these steps often enough to find his way mostly by muscle memory. The only problem was that he couldn’t remember exactly where—

The stairs ended abruptly, and Dipper flailed, pitching forward into empty air. He flinched in anticipation of a twisted ankle, but a strong hand closed around his wrist, pulling him safely back onto the stair and almost flush with a warm chest.

Bill grinned down at him. Dipper could feel his breath rustling his hair. “If I make a joke about you falling for me, are you gonna taser me again?”

Dipper felt his expression flatten. “Yes. That doesn’t mean I want you to drop me!” he yelped as he felt Bill’s grip loosen. He quickly extracted himself from the hold, pulse fluttering—from the near-drop, he was sure; someone should really install lights down here, he doubted anyone waned to escape a supernatural death only to break their neck on the stairs—and stepped down, more carefully this time, onto the ground. His sneakers scuffed on metal tiles as he flicked a switch beside the entryway. Halogen lights snapped on, row by row, illuminating the room.

Dipper spread his arms half-heartedly to encompass the space. “Welcome to the bunker, I guess,” he said. “It’s still not a sex dungeon.”

Bill pushed past him. “No, no, you’re right,” he said, sounding almost thoughtful. His gaze settled briefly on a crate marked CURSED FORTUNE COOKIES (ALPHABETIZED BY THREATENING MESSAGE) **(DO NOT EAT)**. “This stuff’s _way _too niche for a sex dungeon. Now, a film festival—MAYBE!” His expression was nonchalant, arms folded across his chest, but his eye was bright, darting around the room, taking everything in. Dipper felt a stab of—stupid, misplaced, quickly squashed—pride that Bill found the bunker interesting.

“We can stay here until the numpty gets bored,” said Dipper. There was another bellow, almost inaudible from this far underground, and the bunker’s lights flickered. He shifted in place, adding under his breath, “Wouldn’t want to be _self-absorbed _and get ourselves eaten, would we?”

Bill didn’t seem to hear. “Someone had the right idea!” he remarked, blowing the dust off a shelf of glowing relics. He arched an eyebrow at the WARNING: FALLOUT SHELTER plaque hanging on the wall. “More or less."

He wandered over to the side of the room, and Dipper let him. He figured there was no harm in letting him poke around; all the _truly _secret stuff had been long since transferred, and besides, he figured, nothing in the bunker could possibly make Bill any more of a loose canon than he already was. Dipper absently grabbed a pack of Smez from a nearby shelf, popping one into his mouth and settling into a beaten-up desk chair, content to watch Bill explore.

The thing that had caught Bill’s attention was a rack of weapons. _Naturally._ Bill lifted a straight-edged jackknife whose metal crackled with a thin skin of energy, gaze running the length of the blade, then dropped it back and glanced up at Dipper, grinning. There was something inscrutable behind his eye. “Are all meatsacks fond of stuff that can puncture them, or is this a Pines family special?”

Dipper rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on. There aren’t _that _many weapons here.”

Grin still in place, Bill’s gaze flickered from Dipper’s face, to the ceiling-high rack of weapons beside him, and back.

“Okay, fine,” Dipper relented, rubbing the back of his neck. “My family has... a lot of knives. So what? That’s not bad! It’s probably a good thing, if you think about it. It’s a form of bonding, maybe.

“Yeesh, touchy subject!” Bill raised his hands, quirking an eyebrow. “No complaints from my corner, Pine Tree! You can’t choose family, OR SO I’VE HEARD. But hey, you _can_ choose to have a shit-ton of knives in your underground bunker in the middle of the woods!” He flopped down in the other desk chair, gracefully swinging his legs up over the arm rest, and grinned. “And really, THAT'S ALL YOU NEED.”

“Well, I mean...” Dipper used his feet, planted flat on the floor, to rotate the chair’s seat from side to side. “It’s not like they all belong to me.” He paused, trying to recall how much he’d let Bill in on. “Eh, might as well bring you in on the conspiracy. This is—was—_is _my great-uncle’s bunker. My _other _great-uncle.” At Bill’s blank look, he added, “You’re staying in his room at the Shack.”

“So... you gave me your crazy great-uncle’s room,” said Bill, raising his eyebrows and rolling a hand in the universal gesture for _No, please continue, I’d love to hear more of this._

Dipper bristled. “He’s _not_ crazy. And it’s not really his room, I guess. Well, that is, he doesn’t... live with us, per se,” he mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Aww.” Bill stuck his bottom lip out, swivelling in his chair to give Dipper a mock-sympathetic look. “Do Mommy and Daddy not love each other anymore?”

Dipper reached out and shoved Bill’s chair, the demon cackling as his chair rotated. “Shut up, man,” he said, side-eying Bill as he spun, and a thought struck him. How old _was _Bill? Almost certainly much older than Dipper—he’d heard the word ‘millennia’ tossed around a few times—but if that was true, his species probably lived their lives on a different time scale. Bill looked like a young university student.

“Besides,” he added, a defensive edge creeping into his voice, “your family can’t be perfect, either. I haven’t seen _your _parents come looking for you.” For whatever reason, that only made Bill cackle harder.

Bill sighed contentedly as his chair came to a stop. There was a momentary lull, during which Dipper popped a second Smez—he knew they were marked ‘in case of apocalypse,’ but he hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning, and they were surprisingly not terrible, for expired bunker candy—into his mouth. Then:

“What’s this?” Bill swung into an upright sitting position, sounding interested. Dipper followed his gaze and flushed. _Of all the things in the bunker... _He found himself wishing that the numpty would just hurry it up already.

Bill rose from the chair and strode over to what had caught his eye—a large whiteboard on wheels in the corner of the room. Although, by this point, Dipper supposed the term ‘whiteboard’ was generous; its surface was so crisscrossed by various colours of string and marker that it looked like it had been vomited on by a Picasso painting. Come to think of it, Mabel might have _actually_ thrown up on it that night she came home plastered and adamant that she’d ‘solved _allllll_ the myytheries,’ so now they could go home and, hey, why not have another drink to celebrate? What do you _mean, _I should go to bed? Maybe the _real _mystery is how you’re such a buzzkill, bro-bro, ’cause I feel _fantathitic!_

Bill bent at the waist to examine what seemed to be a random section of the Board. His eye crinkled at the corners as he read aloud, “‘Shapeshifting isn’t even that good an ability. If I had some dynamite and a match, I could shapeshift into Explosion-Mabel, but you don’t see me doing that, because I don’t crave external validation for my talents. Also, I’m not a dramatic jerk.’” Beneath that was a drawing of a mushroom cloud flinging bits of a person out of it, helpfully labelled as _Explosion Mabel. _The whole thing had been crossed out in another colour, with PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS written beside it for emphasis. 

“That’s, uh... the Board,” said Dipper, feeling compelled to explain, managing to convey the capital letter through his tone. “It’s where we plan stuff.”

It was much more than that. Not just a cluttered, slightly lopsided whiteboard—_the _cluttered, slightly lopsided whiteboard. He and Mabel had been using the Board to solve mysteries since their first summer in Gravity Falls, and call him sentimental, but looking at it helped remind him of all the times that the hopeless tangle of factoids and headlines had resolved themselves into something coherent. Its smooth surface seemed to carry echoes of simpler times, and having Bill examine it felt... oddly personal. Like he was reading Dipper’s diary. Which was ridiculous—but Dipper still shifted in his seat as Bill lifted a feathering of sticky notes to peer under them.

“Ah. So I _didn’t_ stumble into a conspiracy nut’s wet dream. THAT’S ALWAYS A RELIEF TO KNOW!” Bill paused, gaze lingering on a sticky note. “‘Phone... track... _taser...’” _He grinned up at Dipper. “Hold the phone. That day in the mall, you actually had a plan?” He waved the sticky note airily. “And a colour-coded one, no less. _Colour_ me impressed!”

“Well, it was thrown off by you showing up, but... yeah.” _I guess you could call it a plan. In the same way ‘don’t forget to breathe’ could be called life advice. _

Bill barked a sharp laugh, swiping at his eye. “Wow! Don’t take this the wrong way, kid, but you’re kind of shit at this, aren’t you?”

“Not sure there’s a _right _way to take that,” muttered Dipper, crossing his arms sullenly and sinking lower in his chair. “Besides, I enlisted a demon for help, didn’t I?”

“Oh, yeah, and you’ve been doing a bang-up job of _that_. You come across a demon, and you stick it in a back room and forget about it? I mean, can you say _boring?” _He examined his nails, doing a good impression of indifference, but there was something resentful simmering beneath the action. “Do you have any idea how many people have SOLD THEIR SOULS for this kinda opportunity? IT’S A LOT! People are practically throwing the things at me!” If Dipper didn’t know better, he’d think Bill sounded almost... _offended._

“You’re an extraplanar entity,” Dipper said, sitting forward. “Do you... _get _bored?"

Bill shrugged one shoulder artlessly. “Sure! I’m a DIMENSION-CONSUMING FORCE, not a houseplant. Sometimes you gotta crack a few skulls to unwind, sometimes you gotta crack a book instead.”

Dipper blinked, feeling a bit like a broken record. “You... like to read?”

“Hey, it beats REMINISCING ABOUT THE GOOD OLD DAYS!” Bill was back to rummaging through the Board, his back to Dipper. “It’s not like I spend every day waiting around for some chucklefuck to shake my hand. No offense to present chucklefuck.”

“None taken,” Dipper said numbly. He wasn’t sure why the revelation that Bill enjoyed reading surprised him so much. Maybe because Bill always seemed to be in motion, and it was hard to envision him sitting still for long enough to get through a single page, maybe because... well, because settling in with a good book was such a _human _thing to do. Most of the supernatural creatures he’d spoken to were content to simply _exist_—eating the occasional tourist, listening to old BABBA vinyl, but ultimately satisfied with what they found in the forest.

Although, looking at the brightness in Bill’s eye as the dream demon studied the Board... Yeah. Dipper could picture it.

A funny warm feeling bloomed in the pit of his stomach. Eagerness over the new information, he assumed. There was _so much _he could learn from Bill.

Like how to feel up a wall.

Wait, what?

Bill was running his fingertip along the wall, eye narrowed thoughtfully. He murmured something under his breath, then paused, seeming surprised when nothing happened. He turned back to Dipper, grin back in place.

“So!” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “When do we step out of the kiddie pool?”

Dipper blinked at him from the office chair. “Sorry?”

Bill rolled his eye, still smiling, but there was something lurking behind the expression. “I mean, this obviously isn’t _it. _This is supposed to be a bunker, right? I’m not an idiot, and though I can’t speak for this MYSTICAL GREAT-UNCLE OF YOURS, he seems like the kinda guy to double-check his locks!” He rapped the wall with the backs of his knuckles. “There aren’t any wards on this sucker. It wouldn’t stop a HORSEFLY WITH SOME IMAGINATION, let alone whatever _that’s _meant for.” He nodded at a bazooka-looking weapon mounted on the wall—then tilted his head, smile sharpening into a devilish smirk. “Unless, of course, your great-uncle decided you’re not tall enough for this particular ride.”

The squishy feeling in Dipper’s chest withered and died.

He set his jaw, shaking his head in disbelief. “Jeez, man, learn to quit while you’re ahead.” 

“Look, think of this as an... investment! Part of our deal was that I’d help you with your shapeshifting problem-on-legs. Howd’ya figure I do that if I don’t know where it escaped _from?”_

Dipper hated how logical Bill made spilling his family’s secrets sound. Though, with eons of practice, Dipper supposed even he could get good at convincing people to make stupid decisions. “Fine,” he said grudgingly, scowling up into Bill’s smug face. “But only because I’m trapped in here with you, and I haven’t had enough Smez to handle a temper tantrum. It’s not half as interesting as you make it seem.”

“I’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much!” Bill said, sounding far too pleased with himself.

Still shaking his head, Dipper rose from his chair and headed across the room. He tugged a sagging poster from the wall—with how many times the same tape had been removed and smoothed over, it was practically peeling under its own weight—revealing a metal vault door, with a heavy, serious-looking handle. The kind of handle that was as much a warning as a protective measure. It was mostly for show, though: the chamber was pressure-sealed.

At least, it would have been. If the door was, you know. Closed.

The gleaming vault door stood ajar, exactly the way Dipper had left it. He’d expected as much, but still had to swallow the bitter taste in the back of his throat. _Guess Ford hasn’t been back yet. _He sighed, then clenched his jaw, shoving the door the rest of the way open. It hit the back wall with a _BANG._

Bill eyed the unlocked vault. “Doesn’t that kinda undermine the point of...” He waved a hand at the door. “This FRANKLY IMPRESSIVE amount of compensation?” 

Dipper sighed again. “Normally, it would.” Ducking his head to step through the circular door, he strode quickly through the now-deactivated security room, weaving around frozen stone pillars, trying not to spare a glance at the darkened runes that glittered accusingly at him from the walls. He emerged from the antechamber and gestured before him.

“—but there’s nothing in here,” he finished.

There was a soft intake of breath behind him. Well, at least one of them was enjoying this. Dipper folded his arms across his chest and leaned against a control panel, glaring at the cryogenic pods standing in a neat row on the floor. Each pod was flooded with harsh, sterile light—meant to illuminate the subject, but only serving to reinforce how truly, deeply _empty _they were.

The middle one got a particularly scathing look. It knew what it had done.

“Welcome out of the kiddie pool,” Dipper said, taking Bill’s silence as prompting. “Feel free to poke around, because that’s probably what you’re going to do either way. Just make sure you don’t, you know, fall in or anything, or the pod will auto-lock, and that’ll be a _very _awkward conversa—"

He glanced over his shoulder and paused, surprised to find that Bill hadn’t moved from the exit of the security room. He was staring at the pods, as Dipper had expected, but the look on his face wasn’t gleeful, or mocking, or caustic, or any of the dozens of things—mostly irritating—he’d revealed himself to be. Instead, his gaze was vacant as it lingered on the keypad locks fixed on the doors of the pods. There was something almost... hollow to the cast of his face.

Dipper wasn’t sure why—Bill was the one who’d wanted to see what was behind the vault, after all; this had been _his_ idea—but that blank look made him feel strange. It was such an un-Bill-like expression.

It was unnerving, he decided. Demons shouldn’t look like that, and it shouldn’t make something in his chest twinge painfully.

He surreptitiously cleared his throat, and Bill blinked, as if coming out of a trance. When he noticed Dipper staring at him, any vulnerability vanished from his face, replaced by a contemptuous sneer. “What, great-uncles never told you it was rude to stare?” he snapped, folding his arms protectively across his chest.

For once, a snarky reply didn’t leap to Dipper’s lips. He turned away, feeling oddly like he’d overstepped some boundary. “You know, the numpty is probably gone by now,” he said. “I haven’t heard it for a while.”

Though Dipper couldn’t see his face, he could hear the conflict in Bill’s silence. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Let’s go. This place is a dive, anyway.”

Neither of them looked at the pods as they left.

* * *

Later that night, Dipper hesitated outside of Bill’s room, feeling stupid, arms were full of a variety of books. Before he could overthink it, Dipper dropped the stack beside Bill’s door and hurried away, face warm.

There was a sticky note attached to the top book: 

_I don’t know what demons read, but I thought you might like these. The book this is attached to is one of Mabel’s cookbooks. In case you were wondering what taste is like. Or what people eat. Or can’t eat, I guess._

_-Dipper _

_ <strike>[although, now that I think about it, who else would this be? Never mind. I already wrote my name on this, and it would look weirder to cross it out now. Dang it.</strike> _ _ Enjoy the books.]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof. this took...FAR too long to write. next chapter the Mabel slander stops, i promise. COVID has me stressing, so i'm probably going to be doing a lot of escapist writing lol. as always, huge thanks to everyone who's commented or left kudos <3
> 
> (also, uh. as i read this over i noticed ao3 left some blanks spots, so i had to go a re-copy some of the writing. so if you've noticed an odd blank chunk in a former chapter...that's what that would be. urgh)


	7. Once Is a Chance, Twice Is a Coincidence, Three Times Is Your Coworkers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's this? could it be... an update within a month?? impossible!  
i split this thing into two, because holy shit, i looked back and realized that the last few chapters have been 11k monsters, and this was starting to look that way, too

_Welcome to Cedar Glen Campsites! _read the sign, in faded orange bubble letters. _Home of the original happy camper!_

Agent Trigger was not a happy camper. He wasn’t even a mildly irritated camper.

Agent Trigger was, dare he say it, well on his way to becoming a very _pissed off _camper.

“What do you _mean, _you can’t find it?” he said, rubbing his temples. “It was _right there.”_

Agent Powers pushed his sunglasses up on the bridge of his nose, took a deep, bracing breath. “The trail’s gone cold, sir.”

“I gathered as much from how we’re still deployed in this... place.” He shot a disdainful look at their surroundings. They were partway up one of the cliffs that overlooked the town, standing in a once-abandoned campsite parking lot. Instead of tourists, the flat gravel now played host to a fleet of dark vehicles and piles of equipment that really should have been unpacked more neatly, he’d have to have a word with someone about that. “We were supposed to be gone two weeks ago.”

Agent Powers grimaced. “I know, sir. We’ve run into some... problems.”

“I’ll say.” He folded his arms behind his back. “Tell me, Agent Powers, would one of those problems happen to be the forces at our disposal?”

Powers licked his lips, and said, “Sir, the Enforcement Officers are—”

“Yes, yes, they’re the Warden’s little pet project. But in the interim, they answer to you, correct?”

“Correct, sir.”

“And you answer to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which means that they ultimately fall under my command.”

Powers swallowed. “Yes, sir,” he repeated.

“Excellent. Then maybe _they _can answer me this: Why are we still stationed in the middle of nowhere, on a nowhere dimension, with _no one_ who can—despite repeated sightings!—find a creature who doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘subtlety,’ whose favourite pastime is destroying everything it can get its hands on?” He kept his voice level despite the irritation rising in him. “One would think such a creature would be _simple _to track, no? Or would it be _easier_ to wait for it to spill a bloody trail for us to follow?”

“Sir, the situation is unique—”

_I’d argue our methods have been, too. _“Don’t worry about that,” sighed Trigger, exasperation bubbling up through the cracks in his annoyance. “We’re already paying someone to, and he’s well above either of our paygrades. Dismissed.”

Powers bobbed his head awkwardly, scuttling away—hopefully to straighten up some of that loose wiring, though Trigger doubted it. He shook his head and began the uphill trek to the cliff, footfalls sending up puffs of dirt on the cracked path. They should have apprehended 00002 at the shopping complex. Then again, at the power plant. What was the saying? _Once is a chance, twice is a coincidence, three times is—_

There was a blur of motion in his periphery, and he spun on his heel, hand on the gun at his waist. The black-armoured Enforcement Officer raised their hands, and, though their helmet silenced ambient sound, he could swear he heard them chuckle. “Don’t shoot, officer. I’m too young to die.”

_Ah, yes. Three times is your coworkers. _

Begrudgingly, he let his hand fall from his gun. Shooting one of his own unit wouldn’t look good, much as he might be tempted to. “Officer 35,” he said, nodding stiffly to them. They all insisted on that ridiculous convention—numbers, not names. It made Trigger feel like he was in a bad sci-fi film. Which wasn’t especially encouraging, since, in his limited experience, people like himself tended to wind up as cannon fodder. “What is your status?”

“Good as can be expected,” they said, falling into stride beside him. The _sir _was conspicuously absent. “Considering the wild goose chase we’ve been on.”

_On that, at least, we agree. _“It’s only a matter of time,” said Trigger instead. “The fugitive can’t hide forever.”

They huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh, the sound crackling like static through the filters in their helmet. “You getting paid for optimism?”

“I’m getting paid to do my job,” he said curtly. _Though I understand that’s a foreign concept to you. _“We established the device. There’s no reason to believe it won’t work.”

“Oh, it’s working, all right,” muttered Officer 35. The two of them stopped as they reached the crest of the cliff, and they turned to him. Their armour gleamed black, even in the direct sunlight, like the carapace of some mechanized beetle. “There’s just nothing to work _with. _Everything in this stupid town registers on the radar. It’s basically Battleship—you know that one, right? We’re chucking stuff into the ocean and hoping some of it hits.”

Trigger furrowed his brow. “You’d think something as powerful as 00002 would give off enough energy to overwhelm anything around it.”

“Ah, that’s the thing,” they said, sounding almost excited. “It _was_—we have a reading of its magic signature from the day we installed the register. But for some reason, it’s since stopped expending magic entirely.” They shook their head ruefully. “I can’t believe we went to all the work of setting up the register just to be alerted every time a mermaid sneezes. Did you know they have those here? It’s like we’re losing at a game of Impossible Creatures.” Trigger got the sense they were side-eying him behind their visor. “Have you played _that_ one?”

Trigger ignored that. “What changed?” he mused, looking out across the valley. Gravity Falls’ floating cliffs jutted out into empty space like a vertebra, casting a shadow across the winding river, the sunlight turning the chasm’s stone walls to gold. The vista had a certain raw, gouged quality to it that he could appreciate.

Officer 35 was uncharacteristically silent. “You don’t think he... _knows, _do you?”

Boots crunched on gravel as a second Enforcement Officer came up the path to join them, bumping shoulders with them both. Trigger kept his eye from twitching through sheer force of will. “Jeez, 35, I can’t believe you’re still afraid of him,” the newcomer—Officer 7, if Trigger wasn’t mistaken, though he might well be—teased. They gave Trigger the most perfunctory of nods by way of greeting. He tried not to seethe.

“I’m _not _afraid!” protested Officer 35. “Just... we don’t really know how well the containment worked, do we?”

“On who? Sleeping Beauty?” Officer 7 sorted derisively. “Please. The Warden knows what she’s doing. I’d worry about _her, _not some uppity dream demon.”

“If we didn’t have to be worried, we wouldn’t be stationed all the way out here, would we?” Officer 35 countered, gesturing to the trees. “This place _sucks.”_

Officer 7 grunted their agreement. “Can’t argue with you on that. I tried to order a sandwich the other day, and the lady behind the counter started screaming about ‘the little folk.’ Everyone here is so _weird.” _They drew themself up self-consciously_._ “I mean, it’s not like I’m _that _short. 5’8 is a perfectly respectable height.”

Trigger could hardly believe his ears. Were those two seriously... _complaining _in front of him, their superior officer? He frowned at them. They had no respect for anything, let alone authority, these thugs—and, though he’d never vocalize it, their nonchalance unsettled him. He supposed that when you spent most of your time tracking down interdimensional threats, it became easy to forget that you weren’t one. Easy to forget how effortlessly something like 00002 could pry your soft flesh out of its fibreglass casing, plain as shelling a crab. Easy to forget how it could pummel you into a fleshy pulp without breaking a sweat.

He shifted uneasily in place. The air on top of the cliffs was oppressively still, and _stifling, _and made his teeth itch, like the air itself was reverberating. He tilted his head back to squint angrily into the sky, wiping his brow beneath his sunglasses. The sun beat down, an unforgiving white glare. It almost felt as though it was edging closer. _Ridiculous. Don’t let 7 and 35’s ghost stories get in your head. _Shaking off the feeling, he corrected his posture and directed his attention to the E.O.s.

“As Commanding Officers,” he said, voice firm, “I would ask you to focus on the task at hand.” A bead of sweat trickled down his spine, and he rolled his shoulders. “Let’s at least make an _attempt _at professionalism.”

“Of course,” said Officer 35, after a chagrined pause. They fiddled uncomfortably with their armguard. “We were just—”

“Oh, who are we kidding?” interrupted Officer 7. Their rudeness shocked even Officer 35 into silence. “There’s no professional way to sit around and twiddle your thumbs. The Warden understands this. Until your tech guys start doing their jobs, there won’t be anything to do.” They leaned back, and Trigger got the crawling impression that they were sizing him up behind the Stygian blankness of their visor. “And, with all due respect, Agent”—they inclined their helmeted head—“right now, there really doesn’t seem to be anything to do.”

* * *

“What do you mean, ‘there’s nothing to do’?” asked Dipper, hands on his hips. “Have you _looked _around the Shack?”

Mabel groaned, sliding further down on the couch. “Urrrrgh, you sound like Stan. ‘Do your chores, Mabel.’ ‘Eat your serving of counterfeit money before the cops get here, Mabel.’ ‘Stop leaving the leaf blower in the shower, Mabel.’” She stuck her tongue out. “It’s _borrrring.”_

“That last one actually _was _me,” Dipper said. He frowned at the memory. “I almost electrocuted myself.”

“Huh,” she said, looking thoughtful. “You know, it _did _sound a bit too high-pitched and whiny for Stan in my head.”

He pushed off the wall, clasping his hands in front of him. “Okay, that’s it. We—and by _we_, I mean _you_—are not going to waste another Saturday doing nothing.”

“Blargh,” she grumbled, pulling a pillow onto her face and rolling over, voice muffled by the couch cushions. “Why not? Doing nothing is _excellent.”_

_Because I always have to be doing something, and you somehow manage to get away with doing _nothing, _even though there’s so much to do, and it’s so unfair and I know this is my fault but it’s not like Stan is going to act like a good role model and getting you to help somehow winds up turning into a whole other job and it’s just another thing on my plate and that’s the last thing I need right now— _“C’mon, we’re about to have two whole months of doing nothing,” he said teasingly around the bad taste in his mouth. _Or rather, you will. _“You seriously can’t buck up for a couple more weeks?”

Mabel sniffed and rolled over. She narrowed her eyes at him over the mountain of couch cushions she’d heaped on top of herself, and there was something cold in those eyes, a flinty annoyance. Her lip curled. “Oh, joy, another round of cleaning up your messes.”

Dipper blinked and took a startled step back, and she swung her legs off the couch, rubbing her hands together briskly. “So, what’s on the agenda for today?”

“Wait, what did you just say?”

She raised an eyebrow at him, face back to its usual bubbliness. No... chilling stillness, or whatever that had been. “What’s on the agenda today?”

“No, before that. I thought—” He frowned. Had he imagined that? He rubbed his temples, shaking his head. He knew he needed to get more sleep, but _yikes, _he needed to get more sleep. “Never mind. I was thinking we could work on the whole... there-has-been-a-shapeshifter-running-around-town-for-the-past-two-weeks thing?”

“Oh. Right.” She blew out a breath, scratched the side of her face. “I’d forgotten about that. Huh. Is it just me, or do our escapades usually have shorter, almost episodic, conclusions?”

_Probably because you’re not doing any of the cleanup work. _He bit back the bitter retort, ashamed for even thinking it. “Pretty sure it’s just you.”

She shrugged. “Eh, sometimes Mabel-sense is a blessing, sometimes it’s a curse.” She cast the couch a longing look, running her hand over the cushion beside her, before turning wheedling eyes on him. “But I don’t know, Dipstick. I don’t really feel like a long hike out to the bunker today, do you?”

“Actually, that won’t be a problem.” He stepped back, whisking a thick grey blanket away from where it was draped over a whiteboard stand in the corner of the room. “Ta-dah.”

Mabel jolted forwards, suddenly attentive, as the blanket fell away, revealing an old whiteboard criss-crossed with string. “You moved the Board into the living room?” She frowned at him. “Why?”

It wasn’t because of Bill. But, well... venturing into the bunker with him had made Dipper realize how much he didn’t want to be down there right now. Being surrounded by all of Ford’s old stuff—especially the _pods, _oh, how he dreaded the sight of them—felt like a slap to the face. No: a slap to the _emotions. _Which felt even worse, maybe.

(Also, fine, thinking of that blank look on Bill’s face made something twist uncomfortably in Dipper’s chest. But it _mostly _wasn’t because of that.)

“Well, y’know, it’s—what you said. It’s a bit of a walk. And sometimes it’s raining, or cold out, and I mean... This is just better,” he finished lamely, already grimacing in anticipation of all the super fun follow-up questions Mabel was about to pepper him with. But she only glanced over her shoulder, worrying at her lip.

“Aren’t you worried that... you-know-who might you-know-what if he sees it you-know-where?”

_You-know-who has already you-know-whatted enough for my taste. Eugh, that doesn’t even make sense in my head. _“Don’t worry, he has zero special awareness,” Dipper said. “Remember when we dropped that cursed amulet down the couch cushions and couldn’t find it for weeks?”

She giggled, shoulders relaxing slightly. “He only noticed something was up when he asked the djinn to work the register and it threw a lamp at his head.”

He returned her grin. “Yeah, that was... informative. I stopped trying to exorcise it, just to see how long it would take him to work it out on his own.”

“Three weeks, but I think Soos’s horrified screaming tipped him off, so it’s really anybody’s guess.” Mabel sighed, smile fading, and her gaze took on a wistful, faraway cast. “That was a good time.”

“Yup.” _Although a family where half the members don’t talk to each other has some benefits. There’s no way I would have been able to sneak around with a demon without being caught back then. _Dipper cleared his throat, not liking the oppressive silence that had descended on them, and turned to the Board. “So,” he said, forcing cheer back into his voice, “any ideas? I’ll take pretty much anything, at this point. I’m stuck good.”

Mabel leaned back, gladly picking up the change in topic. “I’m still in favour of retconning Explosion Mabel,” she said, then slapped her own palm in a self-high five. “Hah, callback joke! Those’re really big right now.”

Dipper sighed, massaging his temples. “Okay, anything but _that. _Also, referencing something we’ve already done doesn’t make it a callback joke. That’s... not a thing you can do in real life.”

She nodded knowingly. “Spoken like someone who had cereal for breakfast this morning.” She smacked her palm again and cheered. “Two for two! Man, I’m on _fire _today! Paz is wrong; I’d _totally _be the comic relief character in a sitcom.”

“Isn’t that just... every character in a sitcom?” Dipper asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. We’re getting off track.” He turned, scrutinizing the Board, rubbing absently at his chin. “If Plan A didn’t work, we’ll just have to—”

There were light footsteps in the hallway, too light to be Stan or Soos, and Dipper stiffened, whipping around. He had just enough time to think _uh oh _before a blond head popped around the doorframe.

“Heya, kid,” said Bill, gaze focused on the book in his hands, “not to disrupt your group therapy session or whatever—stars know you need it!—but didja know that you can mix sour cream with a hard-boiled egg yolk and a spoonful of mustard, and it’s basically mayonnaise? Haha! I DON’T KNOW WHAT ANY OF THOSE THINGS ARE!”

He glanced up and froze. His luminous eye met Mabel’s wide brown ones, and for a moment, Dipper honestly couldn’t tell who looked more surprised.

Dipper opened his mouth to say something—what, exactly, he wasn’t sure; Bill as a lost tourist? Bill as a friend from school? Bill as a _colossal idiot _with no sense of timing? —but then it hit him that Bill wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. Actually, his eye seemed to be glowing particularly bright today, in a gentle screw-you to Dipper from the universe.

That was going to be... difficult to explain away.

_Well, _Dipper thought, letting out a long breath. _Crap._

* * *

“Oh, crap,” said Officer 35 nervously, sidling away from Officer 7. Agent Trigger would, of course, never officially condone such unprofessional conduct in the workplace.

Unofficially, though? Oh, crap was right.

“Your attitude is unacceptable, soldier,” he said quietly, drawing himself up to his full height to tower over Officer 7, eyes intent. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the danger of the situation. I will not allow your carelessness to jeopardize the lives of everyone here. If you were one of my own, you’d already be on the next jump back to Zphrmr, facing a court marital for insubordination. They have that where you’re from?”

From their silence, he judged the answer to be _yes. _He set his jaw and took a breath.

“But you aren’t one of mine. So I’m going to give you one more chance before you have to explain to the Warden why you shouldn’t be retired, effective immediately.” Officer 7 was careful not to react to that, or if they did, their armour concealed it, but Officer 35 stiffened visibly. “Now. Will you cooperate?”

“Of course,” Officer 7 said finally. Officer 35 not-so-subtly elbowed them in the ribs, and they begrudgingly added, “Sir.”

“Excellent.” Trigger reached up to adjust his earpiece. It was crackling softly in his ear—something to do with this town’s natural energy spikes. Probably the ‘tech guys,’ as Officer 7 had so eloquently put it, would be able to identify it for him; the erratic static was giving him a headache, and the heat of the day wasn’t helping. “Report back to Agent Powers for a debrief,” he told the officers. “And quit disparaging the tech g— the technicians. You can pick fun at them when you start having the ideas around here.”

He turned to leave, but Officer 35 piped up, hesitantly: “Actually, sir... I think I might have an idea.”

Trigger slowly pivoted back to face them, raising an eyebrow. He stared at them. They shifted uncomfortably.

Ah, what the hell. What could it hurt? Maybe he’d get his first laugh in a decade.

“Well,” he said, rocking back on his heels thoughtfully, “what were you thinking?”

* * *

Mabel stared at Bill. He stared back.

He recovered first. “Oh, Shooting Star. I see you’re still breathing,” he said, not sounding terribly enthused. “Congrats, I guess. I mean, I imagine BASIC BODILY TASKS must be pretty hard for you to keep up with, right?”

Mabel shifted her gaze to Dipper, who was standing in front of the Board, trying very hard not to fidget. “Dipper,” she said slowly, “who is this person?”

“Um,” Dipper said. “This is—”

“NONE OF YOUR MEATSACK BEESWAX!” Bill said cheerfully, saving Dipper from what would have inevitably been the least convincing lie of his life. He stepped in through the doorway, book tucked under his arm, looking remarkably blasé with the whole situation now that he’d gotten over his initial surprise. “But you can call me Bill. I get that that last one’s a bit of a mouthful—and yours looks like it’s FULL ENOUGH WITH METAL already!”

Mabel squinted at the book under his arm. “Hey, is that my cookbook? _Dipper!”_

Dipper raised his palms placatingly, stepping between Bill and his sister before one of them got the bright idea to come to blows. “Okay, Mabel, just hear me out. This is Bill. He’s... not from around here. He and I have an agreement, and this probably looks bad, but he’s actually been pretty useful and, I mean, I thought he might be able to help us. I know this situation is a bit—”

_“Unfair,” _Mabel finished, crossing her arms across her chest with a frown.

That threw him. Dipper blinked. “Huh?”

“Yeah! I mean, what happened to Stan’s _no-nonhumans-in-the-Shack-unless-they-increase-my-bank-balance _rule?” She flung out her arm to gesture at Bill. “And don’t you tell me he’s a regular dude; I _saw _his freaky eye. So, what gives?” She wrinkled her nose, pouting. “You’re allowed to hang out with Mr. Beeswax, but I bring _one _vampire over and it’s ‘a bad idea’ and ‘a serious health concern’? Nuh-uh. I know a double standard when I see one, bro-bro!”

Of course, Dipper realized with a jolt. Mabel didn’t—_couldn’t—_know what Bill really was. Or that he was much, much worse than a simple vampire.

“You’re right,” he said, delicately. “_That’s_ why I didn’t want you to tell Stan. Because he’ll be annoyed.” He hesitated. “...You _aren’t _going to tell him, are you?”

“Hmm.” Mabel drummed her fingers on her chin. “I dunno, broski. I mean, what kind of Mystery Shack employee would I be if I let my brother bring goblins and junk into the Shack?” She tilted her head, trying to get a better look at Bill, and Dipper surreptitiously shifted to be in her way. “No offense to you, Mr. Beeswax, I’m sure you’re a very well-mannered...”

She finally rose from the couch and trailed off, eyes going wide as she got an unobstructed view over Dipper’s shoulder. “...goblin?” she practically squeaked.

“Lucky thing I’m not a goblin, huh?” said Bill—tall and blond and very much _not a goblin_—cheerfully, quirking an eyebrow.

She nodded mutely. _Oh, come on, _Dipper thought, irrationally grumpy, _he could still be a serial killer, or something._ Then Mabel shook her head, and she turned back to Dipper, flashing him a broad, magnanimous smile. “You know what, Dipdop, why not let bygones be bygones? After all,” and she glanced at Bill through half-lidded eyes, “it would be rude to kick out a guest so soon.”

Come to think of it, Dipper might have preferred her suspicion. At least it wouldn’t make him want to throw up in his mouth a little.

* * *

Agent Trigger strode down the path, shade creeping further up his back with every step. Back to the vehicles and the gravel parking lot and that awful, awful billboard. He mulled over Agent 35’s proposition the whole time.

It was stupid. There was no beating around the bush—the chances of it working were laughable, and if it went sideways, that little strike in Trigger’s file would be multiplied six-fold. And if _one—_unprecedented, unplanned—breach sent everyone scrambling, he doubted he would be kept around to find out what five more would do, especially if he were responsible for them.

And yet...

Trigger had worked under undesirable conditions before. But never had his soldiers been, in essence, trained thugs. Thugs that disregarded direct orders. Thugs that spat in the face of the command structure. Thugs that thought comparisons to Battleship were perfectly in place in a debriefing.

Trigger needed to get results. And—much as it pained him to think it—under these conditions, he couldn’t.

_I suppose we’ll just have to find someone who can._

Agent Powers fell in step beside him. “What are our orders, sir?”

“Ready the gateway,” he said, not slowing.

“What?” Powers almost tripped over his own feet. He recovered swiftly and snapped a sharp salute. “Sir, permission to speak freely, sir!”

“Permission granted, Agent.”

“Sir, has sir ever seen Suicide Squad, sir!”

Trigger paused, looking over his shoulder, eyebrow raised. “Are you sassing me, Agent? Because I’ve had my fill of that for the day.”

Power’s lips drew themselves to a thin, bloodless line. “Sir, no, sir!” Any irritation Trigger might have felt towards him was swallowed up as he recalled how nice it was to see people’s faces when he was talking to them. If 7 hadn’t been wearing that ridiculous visor, maybe he would have gone easier on them. Maybe.

Probably not.

As it was, he just shook his head at the practically-vibrating agent. “Dismissed, Agent. And keep an eye on that gateway this time.” Powers gave a precise nod, already striding away, barking orders at a loitering crowd of E.O.s. Trigger watched him a moment, then continued down the trail. He had a job to do.

And, with any luck, no one would need to tell the Warden.

* * *

“So,” Dipper said anxiously, doing his best to ignore Mabel’s coquettish grin, “does this mean you won’t tell Stan?”

“Hmm? Oh, sure, sure,” she said, but he got the sense she was no longer paying attention to him. Her gaze was fixed firmly on Bill. “So, where are you from?” she said conversationally, leaning one hip against the couch. Dipper didn’t miss the appreciative way her eyes swept Bill’s body. “I mean, you’re no gnome, that’s for sure.”

Bill laughed the question off. “Oh, y’know. AROUND! A little here, a little there.” His gaze darted to Dipper, who had just enough time to see the mischievous glint there before Bill drew his focus back to Mabel. “Actually,” he said conspiratorially, “your brother and I have been working together on a little something.”

“Oh?” Though Mabel didn’t physically raise her eyebrows, Dipper knew her well enough to tell she wanted to. “So, you two know each other well?”

“Oh, yeah.” Bill’s voice dropped suggestively. “_Very _well.”

“Not that well,” Dipper amended at the scandalized look she shot him. Averting his eyes, he rubbed at the back of his neck. “He actually... took a look at the Board.”

That dragged Mabel’s attention back from whatever romantic fantasy she’d been constructing. “Wait, seriously?” she said, disbelieving. “So, he knows—”

“ANY- AND EVERYTHING?” Bill laughed. “You can bet that sweater of yours on it! Or don’t—it looks funnier on you, anyways.”

“Really?” Mabel blinked at Dipper, a line appearing between her eyebrows as she frowned—obviously stung, but doing her best to ignore it. She tugged self-consciously on a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail. “I didn’t think you were telling—”

“He knows everything he needs to,” Dipper cut in. It came out brusquer than he’d intended, and he sighed. “Don’t worry. He doesn’t—”

Well. Bill probably _did _know things Mabel didn’t. Just not... about the issue she was thinking of.

“That’s just... a thing with him,” Dipper said. “It’s, like, part of his schtick, or whatever.”

Mabel tilted her head at Bill. “Schtick? Why do you need a schtick?” Her eyes lit up, and she clapped her hands together excitedly. “Ooh, are you a salesman? Quick, quick, tell me the least consequential action I’ll ever take! That’s a salesman thing, right?”

Bill opened his mouth, seeming all too happy to oblige her, but Dipper cut in, pushing him backwards. “You know, Bill and I should probably, um, get to work on that _project_, so—"

“Whaat? No way! You just got here! C’mon, bro-bro, don’t be a stranger!” Now that Mabel had seen Bill, a lazy Saturday seemed the last thing on her mind. She snapped her fingers. “Hey, why don’t we see what he thinks on the whole shifter debacle?” She batted her eyes. “I’m sure he can offer a _unique perspective.”_

“Um, Mabel, I really don’t think that’s such a good—"

“Oh, hush, you,” she scolded him playfully. “What reason could you possibly have for rushing this poor boy off so soon?”

Several reasons leapt immediately to mind, each more unusable than the other. _Mabel, this ‘poor boy’ is actually—funny story, remind me to tell it to you later!—a conniving demon. Mabel, he’s wanted by interdimensional authorities. Mabel, he thinks it’s fine to wear dress shirts just whenever._

Something in Dipper’s face must have betrayed his thoughts, because Bill elbowed him sharply in the back. _“Ix-nay on the emon-day, kid,” _he hissed through a wide grin.

Dipper shot him a dirty look, one he hoped properly conveyed ‘I am going to shove that cookbook up your ass for getting me into this situation,’ then turned around... to see Mabel staring, mouth hanging open.

Her eyes slowly roved between the two of them. “Waaaait. Did you say... demon?”

Of course. _Of course_ the several-millennia-old entity would go for Pig Latin, the jargon most learned by parents speaking over their children’s heads, people who wanted to seem like they knew a second language without putting the effort in—and bored twelve-year-old twins, spending the summer in a small town they didn’t yet know was magic, with nothing better to do.

Dipper felt a bit like a Scooby-Doo villain as he lamented how_ close _they’d been to getting away with it, too.

_Nice one, Bill. Very nice._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah, yes, mabel finally joins the story for real


	8. Dipper Does All the Work in the Group Project from Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have nothing to say for myself except that burnout can go suck a duck

“Did you say ‘demon’?” repeated Mabel.

Apparently, Dipper’s silence was confirmation enough, which he found unfair: he was still trying to catch his mind up with Bill’s mouth, nothing _necessarily _incriminating about that. But Mabel sprung off the couch, hands balled into fists at her sides.

“You did! You totally _did! _Well, that or semen, but that one’s just gross and, now that I think about it, doesn’t really make sense in context.” She pointed a finger threateningly at Bill, who continued to lounge against the wall, looking supremely unthreatened. “You stay away from my brother, demon!”

His lips curled in a toothy grin—and, sharp teeth bared like that, pupils narrowed to thin black slits, he really _did _look demonic, which Dipper figured wasn’t doing their case any favours. Then again, by the looks of it, their case was pretty much dead in the water anyway. “What, you think you can take me, Shooting Star? I’d _kill _to see how that’d go.” Bill tapped a finger on his chin, pretending to think. “Hmm. WHICH GREAT-UNCLE IS YOUR FAVOURITE, again?”

There was a low-grade buzzing, and the living room lights flickered. It was there and gone again in half a second, but Mabel jumped, eying the lamp suspiciously. “Stop using your demon powers on the fuse box!”

“Oh, well, SINCE YOU ASKED SO NICELY,” Bill said, sickly sweet. “And—for Pine Tree’s record; I know how much he loves to take notes—that’s on your SHITTY WIRING, not me.”

“Pine Tree? What’s Pine Tree?” Mabel asked sharply. “Why do you keep calling him that? His _name _is _Dipper.”_

There was a sinking sensation in Dipper’s stomach. He was so used to it these days, he couldn’t tell if it was dread or déjà vu. “Whoa, okay, guys, let’s just back it up a second here,” he said, trying to interpose himself between them, but Mabel shoved him out of the way.

“Don’t worry, Dipper,” she said, pulling him protectively behind her and glowering at Bill. “I don’t know if you’re possessed or mind-controlled or cursed to do this jerkface’s bidding or _what, _but I’ve got you.”

“Wait—”

Bill was positively cackling. “Oh, so you’ve ‘got him’? If I wanted to hurt him, do you really think an extra SIX INCHES OF FLESH between us would do ANYTHING to stop me?” He tilted his head. “Jeez, Shooting Star, I didn’t think it was possible, but YOU’RE ACTUALLY DUMBER THAN YOU LOOK!”

“And _you, _sir, if that even is your real name, are the _worst _houseguest I’ve ever had. And yes_, _that _is _including the termite people.” Mabel’s shoulders were tight with tension, but her glare was steady. “Now, I’m going to give you to the count of three. By then, if you haven’t left my house willingly, I’ll poke out your other eye and _force _you out, in which case you’ll get to experience the thrill of navigating the forest completely blind.” She stuck up her pointer finger. “One.”

“All the way up to _three_? Oh, please, DON’T STRAIN YOURSELF ON MY ACCOUNT.”

“Guys,” said Dipper.

“You really shouldn’t be so cocky. You aren’t the first supernatural creature to take advantage of Dipper’s big, mushy brain. Two.”

Bill’s eye narrowed over his grin. “NOT TOO LATE FOR ME TO BE THE LAST!”

“_Guys.”_

“Thr—”

“_GUYS!” _Dipper shouted. To his surprise, the two of them fell silent. He shouldered out of Mabel’s grip and planted himself in the middle of the carpet. “Just... stop it, okay? Bill, stop being a dickhead; Mabel, stop counting. Please.”

“I was going to say _thrrr_two-and-a-half_, _for the record,” Mabel grumbled. She jabbed Dipper in the chest with her three extended fingers. “And hey, you owe me an explanation, buster! And more than ‘oh, he’s helping me with my science fair diorama,’ this time.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Dipper said, rubbing his sternum with a wince; she poked _hard. _He glanced over his shoulder at Bill. “It’s... kind of a long story.”

Bill’s lips were still curled in that unfriendly smile, eye trained on Mabel. “I’d be _more _than happy to give you the SparkNotes.”

“Nope, not doing that.” Dipper had no idea what the story would sound like narrated by Bill, and frankly, he wasn’t sure Mabel was ready to be exposed to that. He wasn’t sure _he _was. “If you’ll give us a moment, Your Majesty?”

He didn’t wait for a response before he dragged Mabel out into the hallway, where they could talk while keeping an eye on Bill. He pretended not to notice her pantomiming stabbing out an eye at Bill over his shoulder. Once they were out of earshot, he took a deep breath. “Okay. So. I might have some explaining to do.”

“You’re darn tootin’ you do,” she said, crossing her arms. “And I want the _whole story_. Start to end. Left to right. California to Maine.”

“Right.” He blew out his cheeks; he supposed he owed her that much. “You remember the first time we tried to catch the shifter?”

“At the mall?”

“Yeah.”

She stared at him. “Dipper, that was two weeks ago.”

“...Yeah.”

Quickly, before she could tear into him, Dipper launched into a condensed version of the events of the last few weeks: the mall, the deal, the bunker. He kept some details to himself—she didn’t need to know about the woman at the yard sale, or the manacle resting at the bottom of his desk drawer. When he was finished, Mabel just blinked, then rubbed at her temples. “_Where _did you say he was from, again?”

“From Zph— Zphr—”

“Zphrmr,” supplied Bill—apparently not out of earshot after all—from the next room.

“Yeah, that,” Dipper said, as a scowling Mabel towed him further down the corridor. A fine line appeared between his eyebrows. “They couldn’t have added _one _vowel? Just one?”

His attention was drawn back by Mabel clapping her hands together. “Um, could we back it up, please?” She glanced between Dipper and where Bill was sitting in the next room, brow furrowed. “Like, way up? Like... back to the part where there has been a _demon _living in our _house _for the past _two weeks _and _no one _thought to tell me_, _what the _heck, _Dipper!”

“Well... you _have _been in your room a lot?” he said weakly.

The look she levelled at him was utterly unamused. He winced, and she sighed.

“Okay, so he’s a demon. And... you made a deal with him. We’re making deals with demons now.” A lock of hair had escaped her ponytail. She smoothed it back absently, then lowered her voice and asked, “Are you _sure _you’re fine? You’re legitimately okay with this guy? You—oh no, you aren’t being possessed, are you? Do you need me to shoot that guy for you?” She shot Bill a suspicious look through the doorway. He waved cheerfully. “Because I’ll totally shoot that guy for you.”

“Mabel, if I were possessed, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, because I’d be possessed,” Dipper pointed out. “But no. You don’t have to do anything. Not right now. I think he’s dangerous, but not to us. Not as long as the deal stands.” He blinked. “And, sorry, did you just say _shoot?”_

She slowly retracted her hand from her waist, looking trapped. “Nnnnooo.”

“Oh my god, Mabel, do you just... have a gun on you?”

“Oh, come on,” she said defensively, “it’s not _that _weird. We live in a town with werewolves and Bigfoots and people who dine-and-dash from local businesses, the _fiends_.”

“Does Stan know you have that?”

“Uh, doy. Where do you think I got it from?” She rolled her eyes at his expression. “Relax, it’s basically like your taser. Just more bullet-y.”

“You can’t _kill someone_ with a taser!” He hesitated, remembering the officer in the power plant, and they way they’d writhed in front of him. “I don’t think. You can’t, right?”

“Okay, I think you’re being a teensy bit dramatic here, bro-bro,” Mabel said, heaving an exasperated sigh. “You don’t _know _if I’ve killed anyone.”

“Wait, have you?”

She tried to backpedal. “You know, I feel like I’m not the person most qualified to answer this question—”

“This question should be easy to answer. Just a straight yes-or-no answer.”

“See, but that takes the complexity out of the gun control debate. It’s not black-and-white, you know? And, really, what are yes-or-no questions, if not attempts to project an artificial moral dichotomy on a world of greys?”

Dipper pinched the bridge of his nose. “The effort you’re putting into dodging the question makes me really, really feel like the answer is yes.”

“Hey, you’re the one changing the topic!” she said, stabbing a finger back towards the living room. “The topic of _what the heck were you thinking when you let a demon into the Shack.”_

“Yeah,” Bill called, “GO BACK TO TALKING ABOUT ME! That was much more interesting than Shooting Star’s life of crime.”

They shuffled even further down the hallway. “Maybe we should just move to another room,” Dipper suggested.

“And leave the demon unsupervised?” She shook her head. “Nuh-uh. We’re doing this here, where I don’t have to worry about him setting fire to the carpet, or whatever it is demons do.”

Dipper decided this probably wouldn’t be the best time to tell her how much of Bill’s time at the Shack had been pent unsupervised. “Right. Well, at least he keeps the trees fed,” he said, laughing nervously. “You know. Because he, um, talks a lot. That’s the joke.”

Mabel’s lips quirked upwards. Then her smile faded into something more serious, and she grabbed his upper arm, looking him dead in the eye. “Seriously, though, Dipper. Don’t think coming clean after I’ve caught you red-handed magically makes me not mad. You hid this from me for _weeks, _and not once did you think about coming to me for help.”

Casting his eyes down resignedly, Dipper said, “I understand.” It was as much—no, _more_—than he deserved, but it still made his chest pang.

_“But,” _she continued, holding up a finger. “But. I might be mad, but I’m also your sister, and that means I’ll help you _now. _Even if you did make a stupid deal with a stupider demon.”

“I’M STILL RIGHT HERE, YOU KNOW! I have no idea why you’re both under the delusion that these walls are soundproof. They’re barely _windproof. _Sheesh, even _I _know walls aren’t supposed to shake like that.”

“Shut up, Bill,” Dipper and Mabel said at the same time, then caught each other’s eyes and giggled. Laughing with his sister felt... nice. It struck Dipper that he couldn’t recall the last time they’d had a full conversation.

Some of the tension had leached out of the air, and Mabel sighed, tipping her head back and reaching up to push a hand through her hair before she remembered it was in a ponytail. She settled for tugging at the hair elastic. “Just,” she said, lips pursed. “Clean up one mess before you make another, okay?”

Dipper blinked rapidly, feeling like he’d just been punched in the gut, and the aura of comradery shattered. “Right,” he said, struggling to keep the tightness out of his voice. “I’ll get right on that.”

“Look.” Mabel dragged her gaze back to his. “I just... I can’t have more people not talking to each other at the breakfast table. Or not showing up at all. We’re a family, y’know?” She raised a fist, smiling weakly. “We’re the Mystery Twins. We have to be able to count on each other.”

Dipper tapped his fist to hers, smiling past the guilt swarming thick and thorny in his chest. He couldn’t be mad at her; that wouldn’t be fair. He had only himself to blame. “That name is still stupid.”

“Oh, shut up. It’s got _gravitas.” _

“NAH, PRETTY SURE IT’S JUST STUPID!”

“No one asked you, Bill!” Mabel hollered over her shoulder.

“Well then, _maybe_ you should walk MORE THAN TEN FEET AWAY to have your heartfelt discussions! Eeesh, all your emotions are gonna give me hives.”

Mabel huffed, turning to Dipper. “How long did you say we had to let him stay?”

“Just until we catch the shifter,” Dipper reassured her. “Then our deal’s done.”

“Well then.” She put her hands on her hips, a new resolve entering her eyes—and suddenly she looked every inch Ford’s grandniece. “Better hold on to your socks, bro. We’ve got a shapeshifter to apprehend.”

* * *

“Okay,” Dipper said, pacing in front of the Board, tapping a whiteboard marker against his open palm, “here’s the situation. There’s a shapeshifter on the loose from Great-Uncle Ford’s bunker.” He pointed the marker at a crude stick figure drawing with sharp triangles for teeth and angry eyebrows. _Feed me butts _was written in the speech blurb coming out of its mouth.

“I drew that,” offered Mabel.

“Gee, really? I COULDN’T TELL,” muttered Bill.

Dipper raised his voice over them. “Mabel and I almost had it cornered in the mall when it first escaped, but _someone_—thanks, Bill—threw a wrench in that plan.”

“Aw, shucks, it was nothing. Just doing my job, same as anyone else,” Bill drawled from the couch. Mabel tossed a frown at him. Dipper had offered to get a chair from the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to sit next to the demon, but Bill had laughed disparagingly, and her mouth had drawn itself into a thin, determined line, and that had been the end of the discussion. Now she was perched stiffly at the very edge of the cushion, her spine a rigid column, trying not to look uncomfortable beside Bill’s unconcerned sprawl.

Standing in front of the two of them—a demon and his sister—in front of a whiteboard like a schoolteacher felt distinctly surreal. Then again, a diminishing part of Dipper’s mind was still convinced these past few weeks had been one long fever dream

“We have no idea where it is now,” he continued. “Some would argue that finding a creature that can be _any _creature is the definition of an impossible task. And, you know, they would be right. Fortunately for us, we have a way of tracking it.”

Mabel inhaled through her nose, looking rueful. “Actually,” she said, “you might want to wipe that off the Board. Guess who found her phone abandoned in a potted plant in the mall? Yaaay! But also not yay, because Find My Friends will just lead to me. On the plus side, though, I can play Animal Crossing again. Only the mobile version, but still.”

“Ooh,” said Bill.

“I _know, _right?” For a moment, Mabel’s icy front thawed, and she beamed. “It’s like reliving my childhood without having to dig my DS out of whatever drawer it’s at the bottom of!” She paused. “Oh. I see. You were being sarcastic.”

“Can we please focus?” Dipper asked, the heel of his palm pressed to his forehead.

“I don’t know, maybe Shooting Star wants to share MORE REASONS WHY SHE’S NOW SINGLE!” Bill pillowed his chin on his hand, grinning. “And here I thought it was just her personality!”

Mabel flinched, hands clenching in her lap, and Dipper shot him a warning look. “Remember the ‘no harming my family’ part of the deal? Consider this a subsection: the asshole clause. It’s where you aren’t an asshole, and we don’t evict you.”

“You think _that’s _being an asshole?” Bill huffed and sank down in his seat. “You must be a fan of LONG SILENCES.”

“Can’t say I’m a fan of the alternative,” Mabel muttered. One of Bill’s arms was draped along the back of the couch, and her jaw got a little tighter every time his fingers tapped—which, judging from the amused crinkle of his eye and the steady rhythm he was drumming, Bill was very much aware of. 

Dipper paused for a second, waiting to see if the silence would hold. When it did, he sighed. “_Thank_ you.” He uncapped his marker and began to write _THE PLAN _on the Board, and Mabel made a pained noise in the back of her throat.

He turned back, inwardly groaning. “Yes?”

She was eyeing the marker with undisguised longing. “Should we have a designated note-taker?”

_“Fine. _Who wants to be note-taker?”

“Ooh, ooh, me!” Mabel’s hand shot up so quickly she almost lunged out of her seat. “Note-taker Mabel, at your assistance!”

She threw Bill a challenging look, as if daring him to laugh at her, then bounced up to the front of the room and grabbed the marker out of Dipper’s hand. He settled himself down on the couch in her place. Bill leaned over, lips brushing the shell of Dipper’s ear, and murmured, “No wonder she held her ground. A sweater in May? Your sister’s _fearless.” _ Against his will, Dipper chuckled, then cleared his throat, doing his best to school his features into a reproachful mask as Mabel erased his title and wrote _Operation: Clean-Up Crew!!!! _in its place.

“Okay,” Dipper said once he felt she had added enough exclamation points. “As I was _saying, _we can’t do anything until we find the shifter. So that’s step number one.”

Mabel wrote _Step 1: Figure out what’s going on _on the Board. After a moment of deliberation, she added, _and then break the shifter’s face._

Bill snickered, settling back into the couch. “Can’t wait to see how you go about accomplishing this one, kid. HOPE YOU’VE GOT THAT LIGHTBULB SCREWED IN TIGHT! You’re gonna need some ideas.”

Dipper raised an eyebrow. “As it happens, my idea was to ask you if you had any ideas.”

“Do I have ideas? Always. Do I feel like sharing with the class? Ehh. ASK ME IN THIRTY YEARS!”

“Dipper, what’s he talking about?” Mabel asked. “Isn’t helping part of the deal? Unless...” She slapped a hand to her face, eyes wide. “If I know, is the deal off?”

“No,” Dipper said, at the same time as Bill said, “YOU WISH!”   
  
Dipper shot him a dirty look before going on: “No, because he’s the reason you found out. The deal was only that I wouldn’t tell you. This is on his dumb Pig Latin choice.”

“Uh, REALITY TO PINE TREE? My Pig Latin was _genius.”_

Dipper shook his head. “This isn’t the hill you want to die on, man.”

Bill sniffed, but lifted a hand off the couch to point warningly at Mabel. “Don’t you go running your mouth, though. If you tell anyone, I’m counting it as a breach of the conditions.”

Mabel _pssh_ed. “What are you, a lawyer?” Bill and Dipper exchanged a glance, and she held her hands up placatingly. “Okay, okay, don’t worry. I won’t blab. It’s not like living with a demon is the kind of thing you tell people, anyway.” She didn’t notice the way Dipper twitched at that, and continued, triumphant: “Which means you _do _have to share.”

She held out her palm, and Dipper slapped it obligingly. Bill groaned as if the action physically pained him. “Ugh, no, why are you high-fiving that? Don’t high-five that!”

Mabel stuck her tongue out at him and added _Step 1. b): Bill is a big baby and an ore-say oser-lay_ to the Board. Bill’s groan became a death rattle.

He flopped over into Dipper’s lap. “Pine Tree,” he said, looking up at Dipper imploringly, “this is bullying. Your sister is bullying me. I’m a victim of bullying.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.” Dipper shoved him off and took a deep breath. “Okay,” he began again, hopefully for the last time. _“As I was saying, _we need to find the shifter—and I feel like we, as a group, would be much more productive if you both stopped trying to mutiny for five consecutive minutes.” He looked Bill and Mabel pointedly in the eyes. “Can we do that? Is that a thing we can make happen?”

“If it means more notes ripe for the taking?” Mabel rubbed her palms together gleefully. “Do you even have to ask?”

“Great. So, the main problem isn’t incapacitating it. We all have methods of doing it, of...” He studiously avoided Mabel’s eyes. “...varying permanence.”

“And of varying effectiveness,” Bill said. He’d resettled himself, sprawled across the couch with his legs over the armrest, head just brushing the side of Dipper’s leg, and now he poked Dipper in the thigh. “Zzt. THAT’S THE SOUND OF YOUR TASER FAILING,” he added helpfully.

Mabel narrowed her eyes at Bill’s proximity to her brother, but nodded. “Callback joke,” she said reluctantly.

“Please don’t encourage him, Mabel.”

“What? Game recognizes game!” She held up her palms in a _what can a girl do? _gesture. “Doesn’t mean I like it. But no, I actually have something to contribute to the discussion. Weren’t you talking about the slime the shifter leaves behind, like, forever ago?”

“It’s only been a week, but frankly, I’m more impressed that you actually check your email.”

“Whaaat? My days of Hotmail are long gone, and Gmail Mabel is the _most _responsible. Anyways, I was thinking: couldn’t we just scan for it? It’d lead us right to the shifter, who I am choosing to call Devon from this point onwards.” _Step 2: Devon _joined the Board, and she looked pleased. “It just _feels _like a Devon, you know?”

Dipper frowned, shifting in place; Bill had tilted his head back to look at Mabel, and his warm breath now fanned against Dipper’s leg. It was getting a bit distracting, but he stubbornly refused to move. “We could maybe retrofit one of the scanners for a wider radius, but I’m not sure how many of them we have left.” _Translation: I haven’t checked how many you and Stan succeeded in pawning off. _“Besides, who knows if it’s even still in town? Canvassing the whole town is already a steep task; expanding the search radius beyond that is pretty much impossible.”

“It won’t have skipped town,” Mabel said, with a firm certainty Dipper didn’t feel. “And once we get it, we can run it through a giant cheese grater.”

“And salt it!” added Bill. “RUBBING SALT IN WOUNDS is always fun.”

“Same with lemon juice.”

“Don’t forget butter,” Bill said, in the sage tone of one who has learned much over a short time. “That’s very important, for some reason. PROBABLY THE YELLOWNESS! Y’know, Shooting Star, that book of yours has some interesting ideas. Boy, cooking sure gets easier once you start thinking of it as torture! Then again, WHAT DOESN’T?”

Mabel’s grin rivalled Bill’s. “Implying that there’s a difference?”

“Huh.” Bill considered her. “Y’know, Sweater Weather, I’ve gotta admit, you’re kinda growing on me! LIKE A MOULD. Maybe you’re not so bad!”

_“Duh. _I’d say ‘right back at you,’ but, you know—criminal. You probably _are _that bad.”

As the two of them chortled, Dipper marvelled, once again, at Mabel’s extraordinary ability to get along with literally everything. He shook his head in wonder and mild concern. “You guys are like two homicidal peas in a pod.”

It was almost uncanny, how little his sister seemed to care about Bill’s presence. Huh. He wondered if he should be worried about that.

“So,” Mabel was asking, “do you, like, eat souls?”

Bill’s grin widened. “NOT EXACTLY.”

“Ooh, _intrigue,” _Mabel said, beaming at him, and Dipper could read her perfectly: Even though she knew Bill was a demon and a fugitive and more often than not an asshole, he still had those cheekbones and that hair, and she was still the girl who had kept a boy band in the attic when she was twelve.

An ember of irritation flared dim in Dipper’s chest. Bill didn’t get to squash his sister’s feelings, then turn around and toy with her. “You guys,” he cut in, “this isn’t a joke. Well, I mean, everything’s a joke to Bill—that’s not a compliment, you don’t need to look so pleased with yourself—but really, Mabel? This is a serious problem. Who knows what the shifter’s doing? Maybe it’s stealing people’s faces!” He bit his lip. “I’m not sure _why, _exactly, it would do that, but _it could happen. _We have no idea what it wants! Aside from faces, possibly.”

Nodding gravely, Mabel wrote _Step 3: Put Dipper on decaf._ Then she cocked her head. “Hold up,” she said, nodding to Bill. “Couldn’t you just use your demon juice to find it?”

“Don’t be disgusting, Shooting Star.”

“No, no, I mean your _magic. _You’re a demon, right? You’ve gotta have some magic.”

Dipper felt Bill tense beside him. “It... doesn’t work like that,” he said carefully, propping himself up on one elbow.

“What do you mean, ‘it doesn’t work like that’? Can’t you just snap your fingers, and wham-pow-bippity-bow, hot werewolf boyfriend to hold your drinks? Hypothetically.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not excited about the new Twilight book. _You’re _excited about the new Twilight book.”

Bill sat up all the way up, pressing himself back against the arm of the couch. Dipper only realized how warm the demon had been once Bill had retreated and his legs felt cold. _“Hypothetically,” _Bill said, tightly, and Dipper could see his face closing over by the second, “I could indulge your weird fetishes. But realistically, I won’t, because I have morals.” He paused. “Well. ONE MORAL. And it’s no whatever a werewolf boyfriend is.”

“Okay, but what do your repressions have to do with finding Devon the shapeshifter? Wait!” She pointed the marker accusingly at him. “You’re just saying that because then the deal would be over!”

Bill stared blankly. Then his expression cleared, and he chuckled, slowly shaking his head. “Yup, YOU GOT ME! What can I say—I’m not looking to pack up and hit the road right now. I mean, THIS PLACE ISN’T EXACTLY THE TAJ MAHAL, but I suppose people’ll get used to anything!” He sneered at her. “EVEN SETTING DINNER PLACES FOR ONE.”

Mabel’s mouth dropped open. For a moment, all she could do was work her jaw soundlessly. “Dipper,” she managed, “I think your demon’s a dud. He has a weird aversion to being helpful.”

“And _you _have AN AWFULLY INFLATED SENSE OF SELF-IMPORTANCE for someone who had no idea a demon was living under their roof for _weeks. _How does that make you feel, by the way? ’CAUSE IT MAKES ME FEEL GREAT!”

Mabel’s face twisted, a red flush creeping up to her ears. “I have no idea how my brother put up with you for so long,” she spat. “For your sake, you’d better _hope _we never find that Devon-shifter.”

Bill snorted. “Oh, yeah, Pine Tree’s a REGULAR SAINT. And, as for the chances of you bagging this thing...” His legs were casually half-drawn up to his chest; he looked her up and down over the tops of his knees, smirking. “SOMETHING TELLS ME NOT TO STRESS ABOUT IT.”

Dipper frowned, sitting up as well. “What the hell, Bill?” Why was he self-sabotaging? He and Mabel had just been getting along, and he chose _now _to reassert his demoness? It made no sense.

Mabel was glowering at Bill, the marker clenched tight in her fist. Apprehension flickered at the back of Dipper’s mind—the knowledge that, last time a conversation had gone this way, it had ended in Bill lighting up like a bonfire. And frankly, with the expression on her face, Dipper wouldn’t be surprised if Mabel burst into flames any moment now, either.

He stood up abruptly, cutting off whatever Mabel had been about to do. Something violent, judging from how her fingers twitched towards her belt—something either she or Bill but _definitely _Dipper, who would have to clean up after them, would regret.

“Bill,” he said, looking down at the demon, “is it possible? Can we use magic to find the shifter?”

Bill hesitated. “You can use magic to do a lot of things,” he said evasively.

“Great,” said Mabel, coming to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Dipper—a subconsciously united front. “Then we’ll do that, please and thank you.”

Bill’s lips parted, then pressed back together in a thin line. He looked between the two of them. “Fine,” he said finally. “But _only _Pine Tree. My deal’s with him, not Shooting Star. Unless, of course, you’d be willing to—”

“Not going to happen,” Dipper interrupted.

Bill shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for shooting his shot.”

“I can, actually. So, we’re all in agreement?”

“It’s fine with me,” Mabel sniffed. “Who wants to do magic, anyway? I saw all eight of those movies, and the noseless guy didn’t even get _one _shirtless scene. Have fun with your nineteen hours of fully-clothed Expelliarmus-ing with the world’s _jerkiest _demon, nerd.” She mouthed, _Tell me everything _at Dipper.

“Okay. All right. Cool.” Dipper stepped back and pushed a hand through his hair, riding the jittery, tentative relief of someone who’s caught a vase inches before it hit the ground. He glanced over his shoulder and blinked. “Wha— Mabel, have you not been taking _any _notes?”

She grinned sheepishly and added, _Step 4: Forgive your wonderful sister _to the Board. 

Strikingly, Bill didn’t comment on that. He was quiet, brows drawn together in an expression that Dipper, if he hadn’t known better, would have been tempted to call meditative. But Bill’s disquiet, Mabel’s flightiness; Dipper found them both falling away as he realized what this meant.

He was going to learn _magic._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, so. good news and bad news.
> 
> the BAD news is that my mind is a hellhole and i outline by writing plot points on sticky notes and rearranging them until they spark joy, marie kondo-style, which is all fun and games until you do what i've done and outline up to the eighth chapter, then realize you have somewhere to go and no way to get there. so the next update might take a hot second as i sort all that out
> 
> the GOOD news is that, because my mind is a hellhole and i can't leave my house, i wrote [another billdip fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24481330/chapters/59089663), if you want to check that out in the meantime
> 
> as always, huge thanks to everyone who's commented and kudos'd! <3


	9. A Long, Relaxing Walk off the Deep End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *james acaster voice* started making it, had a breakdown, bon appetite

“You aren’t gonna learn magic.”

That was the first thing Bill said to Dipper the next morning.

They’d headed into the forest just before dawn—Bill had said that was “prime time,” but he’d also said, “ask follow-up questions and I _will _get us both hopelessly lost,” so Dipper had crossed his arms and stewed in stymied curiosity—and for the last twenty minutes or so, Dipper had had no idea where they were.

That loss of direction was more disconcerting than it should have been. Dipper had been in Gravity Falls for years now; that Bill could strike out and immediately find a section of the forest he’d never even come close to before sent apprehension skittering in the pit of his stomach, but he pushed it away for now, because. Well. _Magic._

They’d abandoned any semblance of a path several turns ago and now walked in the cool, deep shadows of old-growth trees. The forest floor here was free of any foliage, their shoes landing directly on dark, loamy soil that swallowed up their footfalls. It made Dipper feel oddly claustrophobic, despite being outside; he tilted his head back, blinking when he realized that he could no longer see the sky through the thick canopy.

He lowered his gaze and frowned at the Bill’s back. The demon was leading the way with single-minded decisiveness, but his gaze had a faraway cast to it that didn’t seem terribly promising. “I thought you said we were going to track the shifter with magic.”

“Oh, so those holes on the sides of your head DO have a use! I ALWAYS WONDERED.”

Dipper didn’t rise to the bait. Bill had been antsy all morning; maybe demons were assholes before their daily Starbucks. Dipper fleetingly entertained the notion of dumping a Frappuccino over Bill’s head as he said, “So I _am _going to learn magic.”

Bill heaved a sigh, stepping easily over a root, and Dipper was struck by how completely his earlier woodland gracelessness had disappeared. “You’re going to _do _magic. Not learn it. There’s a difference. C’mon, kid, I shouldn’t have to tell you that ATTENDING ONE CLASS does not a graduate make!”

“Okay… But it’s not like I _can’t _learn magic. Right?”

“Only in that IT’S EXACTLY LIKE THAT.” At Dipper’s dissatisfied silence, Bill added, shrugging, “Eh, don’t take it personally. Your species tends not to work well as magical conduits.” He waved his fingers, seeming almost… regretful. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but all that BLOOD AND VISCERA AND SLIMY GOODNESS takes up a lotta room.”

“Huh. Wait, though…” Dipper hurried to pull even with Bill. “What about witches? I’ve met some, and they seemed pretty magic to me.”

They’d also seemed on the ‘house of cards’ side of mentally stable, but he decided that wasn’t relevant.

“Oh, there are ‘witches,’ sure.” Bill rolled his eye. “They can drill a spell or two into their heads, but that’s like rote-memorizing a song on an instrument you can’t play. Just because you can pull out Wonderwall if the occasion needs some bringing down doesn’t make you a musician, it makes you a party trick. AND A SHITTY ONE, AT THAT! It’s the same cut with magic.

“People somehow got it into their heads that the guys PLAYING PATTYCAKE WITH TAROT CARDS and lusting after the moon were the ones with the right idea.” Bill grimaced, rolling his neck as if it was stiff. “Eesh. They’re almost as bad as Freemasons.”

“Wait, what’s wrong with Freemasons?” asked Dipper, feeling a little spark of protectiveness toward his namesake.

_“Nothing.” _Bill’s nose wrinkled, like it was the worst thing he could imagine. “That’s the _point_. Oh, they’ve got their handshakes and their passwords and their gender-reassignment membership loopholes—”

“Their _what?” _

“—but when you get right down to it, they’re about as sinister as your average frat bro. Nothing says ‘joiner’ in so few words as DEDICATING YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL to a supreme being you’ve never even seen. Especially when that being is capitalism.”

Bill stopped so suddenly that Dipper automatically braced for them to collide. It was only when they didn’t that he realized he’d halted at the same time, motionless at the lip of a ring of pale birches.

Odd, considering he hadn’t made any conscious effort to stop. His muscles had just… frozen up.

“And hey, wouldya look at that. IT’S OUR STOP. Please keep your arms and legs right where they are—attached to your body!”

Cautiously, Dipper tried to take a step forward, relieved when his legs complied with no resistance. He wandered further into the grove, doing a slow pivot.

“Or you can do none of that. That works, too!”

Even if Dipper’s body hadn’t glitched upon entering, he would have pegged this place as an epicenter of weirdness. The birches ringing the grove weren’t just pale, they were _monochrome, _with leaves the colour of old newspaper—how did _that _work, he wondered briefly, with no chlorophyll to photosynthesize with? Tiny circles adorned their bark like coffee stains; their branches didn’t shake in the wind.

In fact, that stillness extended past the trees: the air itself had an eerie stagnation to it, like a bubble frozen in a block of ice. He took a deep breath and realized the damp moss and wet pine needles scent of the forest had disappeared.

The hush felt… sacred, almost. Reverential.

So, naturally, Bill plopped himself down in the middle of it.

_“Bill,” _Dipper hissed, feeling sacrilegious. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” said Bill, not opening his eye, hands folded across his stomach.

“It looks like you’re… taking a nap.” Dipper couldn’t articulate why, but the idea of falling asleep here sent a chill down his spine. Stories of fairly circles, of vanishing and being spirited away to other realms, flashed in his mind, and he cast a nervous glance at the trees.

Bill sighed longingly. “I wish. Nah, I’m just getting comfortable.” He pushed himself up onto his elbows, crossing his legs in front of him. “This’ll take a hot second.”

He scanned the ground in front of him critically, though the dark soil all looked the same to Dipper, and finally landed on a spot a few feet off to his left. “AHA. There we go!”

“There what goes?”

“There _you _go.” Bill nodded at the spot, more insistently. “That there’s the source of the energy in this grove.”

Dipper trudged over, lowering himself to the ground with considerably more care than Bill had. “So it’s not the trees that are doing this?”

Bill snorted. “Pfft, _no. _You think this ley line is a recent development?” He gestured to the colourless birches, the dead air, the _sky_—which Dipper couldn’t actually see anything different about. He squinted up at it suspiciously. “Why do you think there are so many weird things here? This town couldn’t have been built on more ley lines if the founders _tried. _This is a point of intersection; the grove formed around it. QUITE FASHIONABLY, if I do say so myself. Which of course I do!”

Dipper shrugged off his knapsack and began to dig through it. From this angle, the knots on the trees’ bark looked more like hundreds of tiny eyes than coffee stains, and he frowned at them. Whatever Bill said, there was _something _up with those trees.

“You said I can’t do magic,” he said to distract himself from how the trees seemed to scrutinize him back as he fished the things Bill had told him to bring out of the knapsack: chalk, candles. A grilled cheese sandwich. “So how am I to go about this, exactly?”

“If you can’t do something the legitimate way, do it the easy way. If you can’t do it the easy way, do it the way that uses a SHIT-TON OF CANDLES! Power’s thick in the air here: you don’t need to create energy, you just need the right keycode to access it.” Bill wrinkled his nose. “Ugh, making me resort metaphors. Ritual magic really _does _bring out the worst in people.”

“A keycode?” questioned Dipper. “Hence the sandwich?”

“Huh? Oh, nah, I just wanted to see if you’d actually bring it. And you did! Good on you. It’s got a little baggie, and everything.”

“Finally decided to give up on being the pickiest eater in the multiverse? Careful, Bill, that sounds almost like making _progress.”_

Bill scowled. “Shut your slanderous mouth. I’m not gonna _eat _it.”

“Then I’m afraid your bizarre enjoyment of this sandwich ends now, because I’m _not _toting it all the way back to the Shack.”

“DOESN’T MEAN I CAN’T WATCH IT DECOMPOSE!”

“Whatever floats your sadistic boat, man,” said Dipper, rolling his eyes. Last of all, he pulled a sheet of paper from the backpack, inked with the design Bill had sketched out for him. It looked a bit like a bullseye with symbols etched into the spaces between rings, straight lines connecting their points.

He transferred the chalk to his hand, then glanced from it to the loamy dirt, skeptical. He was far from an expert in chalk art, but he was pretty sure you needed at least a solid surface.

Except, when he tried tracing out the first and smallest circle, apparently he didn’t. The chalk glided over the soil like it was a flat sheet. Dipper stared down at the perfect white line for a moment before shaking his head and thinking _Weird, _then forging ahead, precluding a mental tangent about whatever this soil was made of and the way it almost _congealed _under his touch and how it seemed eager, somehow, to absorb the drawing.

“So,” said Bill, after a minute had elapsed with nothing more than the soft drag of chalk over dirt. “Your sister took that surprisingly well.”

Dipper snorted. “Easy for you to say, man. You didn’t have to explain _you _to her.”

“Hey, I _offered. _Not my fault if you don’t know not to look a gift horse in the mouth! And, FYI, I know it’s part of your whole SOCIALLY-HOPELESS CHARM—I know you can’t see it, so I should inform you, I’m using air quotes—but I don’t appreciate being called an _it.”_

“Mm-hmm.” Dipper glanced down at the paper, debating whether the flourishes on the edges of the symbols were part of the ritual or if Bill just had really nice cursive. He decided to attempt to copy them either way. “Hey, speaking of Mabel,” he said, offhanded, “have you noticed her acting… weird, lately?”

“No weirder than I assume is baseline.” Bill absently tugged at the collar of his shirt. “Why?”

“No reason. I just thought… never mind.”

“Well, _there’s _your problem. You’ve only got THREE POUNDS OF WET SPONGE to do it with, after all!”

Dipper rolled his eyes again—he was getting more mileage out of them with Bill around than he had the rest of his life—and flicked the base of Bill’s neck with his free hand. He turned back before he could see the reaction, but heard Bill’s sharp inhale, followed by a muffled _thump, _like Bill’s arms had given out beneath him.

Dipper drew the next symbol with smugness coiling syrupy in his stomach. So Bill could dish it but couldn’t take it. He’d have to file that away for later.

Impressively, Bill didn’t squawk his outrage for the ominous trees to hear. He didn’t make _any _sound for a moment—was he lying flat on his back staring at the sky? eyeroll number three; what a drama queen—and then Dipper heard rather than saw the demon shift behind him, lifting himself up on his knees to look over his shoulder.

“Pretty good,” Bill murmured, and Dipper almost jumped; Bill’s chin was hovering just above his collar. Staticky tension pooled in Dipper’s legs, filling him with a vague urge he was sure translated to _jump up and leave. _Despite that, he didn’t move, rooted in place by the feeling of Bill’s breath by his ear. “You sure this is your first time?”

Dipper swallowed dry. “I’m pretty sure I would have remembered doing something like this before.”

“Fast learner,” Bill remarked. He hesitated for a split-second; long enough for Dipper’s heart to pound three rapid times in his ears. “Just one little thing.” He pointed over Dipper’s shoulder at one of the sigils, a line with two squiggly arms at either end. “That should be raido.”

“Should be what?”

“You know, it has the little point, kind of like a… a…” Bill hummed in frustration, and that was all the warning Dipper got before Bill’s hands, warm and solid and slender through his shirt, were splaying across his back. It was all he could do not to let himself twitch as Bill’s fingertips ghosted over his spine in lines and bends, tracing an intricate pattern that stirred shivers across Dipper’s skin. “You see?”

_“No,” _said Dipper, voice unexpectedly hoarse. “I don’t, actually. What the hell?”

“Oh, right. I forgot. Forward-facing eyes.” Bill reached past Dipper, and _wow_ was that worse, Bill’s chest pressed momentarily to his back as he stretched for a stick. Dipper found himself holding his breath until the demon withdrew.

As Bill scratched the symbol into the dirt beside Dipper’s thigh, Dipper got the sense that he wasn’t really looking at it. Though they were no longer touching, he could feel the heat radiating off Bill and into the thin space between their bodies, and an unfamiliar part of his mind reared its head to sweetly suggest how good it might feel if he just leaned back half an inch into that warmth.

Dipper shook his head. _What the hell? _he thought again, bewildered, but this time it was directed at himself.

“There,” Bill said after what felt like an eternity. What he’d drawn looked like an angular uppercase _R—_there was no _way _it had taken that long to sketch out—and he sat back on his haunches. As he did, his arm brushed Dipper’s.

Bill blinked at the contact—hard, repeatedly, like he was trying to clear a film from his eye. Or wake up. Then, as abruptly as if he’d been burned, his expression snapped back into focus, and he jerked away from Dipper.

From several feet away, he coughed and glanced away in a poor attempt at disguising what had very clearly, if only momentarily, been _panic. _“Right,” he said, hand flexing at his side. “So. Chop-chop, PT. Every second you SIT THERE AND GAPE is another second the shifter could be wreaking havoc!”

Dipper frowned after Bill as he paced away, toward the outside of the grove. Forget the trees; there was something up with _him__. _His gaze had gone almost… _glazed _for a moment there.

But Bill hadn’t been wrong; Dipper wasn’t here for the sheer, unmitigated joy of messing around in the dirt. He had a job to do. And it wasn’t playing armchair psychologist for a demon.

Dipper placed candles at the cardinal points of the circle and procured a lighter from his back pocket. Bill opened his mouth, then paused. His expression twisted, and he looked away from the lighter, jaw flexing.

“Ready?” asked Dipper.

Bill crossed his arms. “What, waiting for me to count you down from ten? This isn’t exactly a rocket launch.”

Yeah, Dipper couldn’t be _paid _to plumb the depths of Bill’s mind.

Flicking the lighter, he set about kindling the candles. He worked clockwise—not for any arcane reason, but because he didn’t feel like singeing his shirt by leaning over an already-lit candle.  
  
Finally, Dipper touched the flame wobbling at the tip of the lighter to the last candle, and was hit by a spinning rush of sudden nausea as

the wick flared bright and

there was a whooshing past his head and

—that wasn’t right, there was no wind in the clearing—and

the sky flared, brighter and hotter than the wick, like the sun expanding to eat up Dipper’s field of view and

_“Wha—”_

then Dipper was

not

there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i asked the cosmos for the ability to write chapters of a consistent length and they told me to go fuck myself :(( anyways the second part of this'll be up in a few days.
> 
> (come chat w me on [tumblr!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/goldilocked))


	10. WestJet: Love Where You're Going (Even If It's Hell)

Bill would be the first to admit it: that had been, in layman’s terms, a bit of a dick move.

But that was a problem for the him of five minutes ago. Right now, he was waiting to materialize. 

Sound hit him first—a far-off rushing. Then vision filled in, blurry swaths of watercolour blues and greys that sharpened without warning, leaving him blinking hard, shading his face with a hand against the sudden brightness.

Pebbles skittered under Bill’s shoes as he stood, slightly unsteady and made more so by his surroundings. An empty sky swooped away in every direction; dark pools of water stretched across the stony ground beneath him, reflecting nothing, linked by the glittering clear ribbon of a creek. In the distance was a line of mountains, flat-topped and mossy.

Bill sucked in an experimental breath of air clear and cool with altitude. It smelled the way expensive Icelandic spring water tasted, minus the conceit and electrolytes.

The alpine vista resembled something off a postcard. A _terrestrial _postcard.

_Well, time to strike ‘act through a patsy’ off the escape attempt docket, _Bill thought with a mental sigh, brushing himself off._ A shame; Pine Tree wears utter oblivious complicity so _well_._

He caught himself. No. No, Pine Tree did _not _wear anything well, and he really didn’t appreciate the gooey, traitorous idiocy still clinging to his mind attempting to convince him otherwise.

It wasn’t like Bill had woken up with this all planned out. He hadn’t woken up at _all. _But sometimes, when the planets aligned, you owed it to yourself to give in to temptation and at least _try _to knock ’em all out in one go. Why else did humans put up with bowling shoes, if not for a scaled-down taste of that rush?

Because how would Pine Tree know the difference between a location spell and a transportation spell? How would he know the difference between cweorth and raido? And how could he _possibly _be expected to know that there really was very little distinction between the two, when you really got down to it—just a matter of a few diagonal lines?

_Plus..._ The thought crept up on Bill unbidden as he stared out across the tundra. There was the small matter of… the other thing.

The one he was doing he damnedest not to dwell on, as though that would loosen the grip it had on this stupid, self-defeating body.

Call him crazy—heck, go the extra mile and call him clinically insane—but he’d had energy-metabolising glands long before _A=hb/2 _ceased to apply to him; he’d assumed they’d be the _least _challenging part of mastering this body. Sure, he’d noticed himself become increasingly… twitchy… but he’d chalked that up to the disorientation of acclimating to a physical form.

Even the word _gland_—so fleshy, so _biological, _shudder, no thank you—was a misnomer. They were more energy wells than anything, with no outward manifestation. At least, they’d never had an outward manifestation; and, checking the smooth, unbroken skin of his neck in a nearby pool, Bill would be tempted to say they still didn’t.

But…

When the rest of his body had gained sensation… apparently they had, too.

A _lot _of it.

A fact which had been brought to Bill’s attention rather unceremoniously when Pine Tree, showing all the conversational prowess of a two-year-old, had poked him on the back of the neck—and instead of irritation, it had sent an altogether _different _heat through Bill.

He’d been ready to snap out another less-than-flattering comment about the kid’s sister in retribution. But then a thrumming _buzz _had started up in him, radiating out from his collarbone, and his voice had gotten all tangled up and muted in his throat—strike one against vocal-cord dependent speech—because. It felt.

It _felt._

Bill didn’t know how to describe it—and that was saying something, considering the sheer number of ridiculously specific adjectives that existed in Nightmare Realm patois as a solution to the “describing everything as ‘indescribable’ actually does very little to narrow down what you’re talking about” problem.

All he knew was that he must have been further along in this whole starvation process than he’d thought. His nerves had _clearly _begun to misfire. There was no other explanation for the drowsy warmth that had seeped into his muscles, loosening them, fuzzing his thoughts out pleasantly mid-sentence. He hadn’t been able to track what he was saying, only the slight vibration of Pine Tree’s back as the kid replied, and _mm_. That was nice.

Similes were nothing more than the seedier, more discreet cousins of metaphors; still, Bill had found himself resorting to them. It was like… like being drunk on air. Like that time in the storage room, but _better, _so much better when caused by someone else, and tapered by a surge of_ hunger_ so intense that his mouth stung as it flooded with saliva. A directionless hunger that built and built, even as _what _it was that he was hungry for got increasingly hazier.

It was fucking terrifying, and Bill wasn’t doing a very good job of not thinking about it.

Bill Cipher did _not _panic. But when lucidity had started to defog the edges of his mind, like a slap of water across his newly-acquired brain, Bill’s gut had been seized by the urgent, unwavering certainty that he had to _get away._

So. River, pools, picturesque Nordic mountaintop. _Solitude._

If only he’d managed to leave the shivery restlessness beneath his skin behind with Pine Tree.

The sensation had since retreated, but now that Bill had been made aware of it, he could _feel _it—that hunger-nothunger cocktail swirling agitatedly through him. Tentatively, before he could talk himself out of it, he reached up to probe the back of his neck.

This time, Bill was braced for it. Still, the sweet brief ache that flared at the base of his spine took him off-guard. His knees _trembled _with it, like they wanted to buckle on him. Through sheer force of will, he remained on his feet, riding out the low-burning waves as they rocked through him, but he couldn’t completely kill the soft groan that forced itself out of his chest.

_…Not a fluke, _supplied his dazed mind, as soon as words were a thing he could manage again.

He considered a moment, then added, eloquently, _Motherfucker._

Bill didn’t need to look at the manacle to feel its cool metal burning against his abruptly warm skin. “Are you doing this?” he demanded, the ice in his tone undercut by an irritating breathlessness.

Its only reply was an innocent thrumming in the back of his mind.

Bill had officially had enough of the note B-flat. If he ever got around to playing the piano again, he was going to pry that key out and chuck it into the nearest endless abyss. “Well, screw you, too,” he told the metal band.

**And here I thought you’d be pleased to see me.**

The words reverberated through the mountain itself, up Bill’s legs and into his mind, and Bill pressed the heels of his palms into his temples. “Great,” he muttered. “Hunger’s damaged my brain into growing a conscience. Sorry to step on your moment, but the position of OMINOUS DISEMBODIED VOICE has already been filled.”

The voice, low and rumbling like far-off thunder, chuckled; not too warmly, either. **You’re one to talk. You’ve never been on time in all the eons I’ve known you.**

Bill jolted, clammy realization slipping around his ribs. That voice… he _knew that voice. _

He whipped around, eye scanning the mountains, the sky—anywhere that frilly bastard might consider a worthy backdrop for it to manifest.

Finally, his gaze slid down to the creek. The dark water eddied around a smooth pink form, perched delicately on a submerged rock. Its beady eyes were fixed on Bill with unnerving focus.

“Time is an illusion,” Bill said, warily. He swept his gaze over the axolotl—_the_ Axolotl_—_in front of him; an excuse for an extra second to gather himself. “And I admire your commitment to the bit, Ax, but really? You’ve gotta imagine there’s a lower limit _somewhere _down there. I mean, you don’t see me possessing a geometry textbook.”

**Mm. No. **The surface of Axolotl’s perfect tranquility didn’t so much as ripple. **Have you figured out how to use those fingers yet?**

Bill held his palms up. “Hey, no need to compare sizes. I’m not knocking it; amphibious is a good look! Very modern. Very… slimming. You know what they say: NEOTENY IS THE NEW BLACK!” He paused deliberately. _“Do _they still say that? I suppose it _has _been… oh, gee, I don’t even know… something like SEVEN THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS?”

**I thought time was an illusion. **

Axolotl’s voice in his mind sounded almost _amused. _Bill wrangled his instinctive scowl into an easy-breezy nonchalance.

“Yeah, and the last few millennia have been a very _boring _illusion. I prefer my collective imaginings with A BIT MORE FLAIR. We can’t all indulge in the joys of sucking up worms in lakebeds!”

**Oh, I’m well aware of what you’d prefer. But I’m not here for a social call.**

“Phew. And HERE I WAS, thinking you just didn’t find my dazzling rejoinders up to snuff,” drawled Bill. “So, Frills—you don’t mind if I drop the article, do you? _‘the_ Frills’ just sounds pretentious—I was wondering when you’d pop up.” Centuries of practice kept bitterness from seeping into his tone. “Just can’t resist SHAKING THE PETRI DISH, huh?”

**Don’t think so little of yourself, Cipher. **Water lapped at Axolotl’s tail, but it remained still, unbothered with trifling things like the current. **You are more than an experiment. Though it’s true, I was curious to see what you would do.**

“And?”

Bill mentally kicked himself as soon as it slipped out. Urgh, he sounded like a child begging its parent for approval; the last thing he needed was Axolotl getting it in its—already oversized—head that its opinion _mattered _to him. Eesh.

Axolotl’s only answer was a hum. It could have been a thoughtful hum, or it could’ve been a dubious hum, or it could’ve been an _'__oooh, I’m soooo in tune with the cosmos, stare into my gills and shit black holes if you_ _dare' _hum. Bill gritted his teeth and shoved down the urge to seize Axolotl’s soft little body and give it a good shake.

When it became clear that Axolotl was content with gazing enigmatically off into the middle distance, possibly for the rest of eternity, Bill said, “Well, I’m hurt. Really. Aren’t Achilles heels a little gauche?”

Axolotl’s shovel-shaped head lifted to regard Bill evenly. **Talking in circles? I see it hasn’t taken you long to revert to old habits.**

“Revert to?” Bill snorted. “I never dropped ’em. Hate to break it to you, but if you wanted me to ‘learn my lesson,’ you should’ve left me in Zphrmr.’

**Are you asking to be sent back?**

_No no no no no— _“And RUIN ALL YOUR HARD WORK? Please. Not that I’m _not _flattered to be your little science-fair experiment, but the judges sure are taking their sweet time with—”

A frisson of hunger clawed at him, and he broke off, shoulders hunching.

**Mm, **hummed Axolotl. It didn’t so much as _glance _at him, the waste of deep-dried—

Bill straightened and pushed a hand through his hair. “You did this to me,” he said flatly, dropping all pretense of amiability. “Why? Why set me free, only to dump me in a kneecapped body, sic the E.O.s on me, and leave me to starve?”

Axolotl’s eyes were darker than the black water churning around it. **Are you sure it’s me that’s handicapping you?**

“Spare me the cryptic mumbo-jumbo. I've played the inscrutable extradimensional being card before, and we both know it’s a load of shit.”

**Oh, I wouldn’t presume to bother you with ‘cryptic mumbo-jumbo.’** Bill only had a second to wonder if that was bona fide _sarcasm _before it continued, placidly, **Zphrmr wasn’t harsh enough on you.**

Bill jerked back as if stung. Seized by the irrational—or all _too _rational—urge to scan the mountaintop for Enforcement Officers, it took him a moment to realize Axolotl wasn’t making a move: just staring at him with those flat, fathomless eyes.

_You have no idea what you’re talking about you have no idea what it’s like how would you like to be dragged out of that stream and have your gills packed with sand—_

“But?” He slipped his hands in his pockets in case they decided to do something mortifying, like start trembling. “Please tell me there’s a ‘but.’ If not, this is gonna get awkward.”

**But,** Axolotl allowed. Bill could have sworn one corner of its tiny mouth ticked up into an impossible smile. **You were bound to get free sooner or later. I simply allowed the process to carry out on my own terms.**

Bill tried to be gleeful about Axolotl’s stupidly rigid sense of duty. But it was hard, with the amphibian in question watching him so impassively, to shake the sense that he’d traded one prison for a larger one.

_(Even with a transport spell, he hadn’t managed to get off-world.)_

He sat on his haunches to bring them to eye level. “And what, part of this song and dance is having me HUNTED FOR SPORT ON A BACKWATER DIMENSION?” Bill laughed harshly. “Yeesh, Ax, you’ve gotten cold! Take a quick seven-thousand-year-long nap, and suddenly, IT’S A PARTY UNIVERSE! Go figure, huh?”

**The officers were unfortunate. **Axolotl didn’t blink. Didn’t break eye contact. **Your Warden is tenacious.**

“She’s not my _anything,” _Bill snapped. _Not until I rip her head off and repurpose it, _he thought better of adding. _Then she’ll be my doorstop. _

He’d even start opening doors, rather than blasting them dramatically off their hinges, just to slam it in her face—and after all, wasn’t vindictiveness one of the tenets of positive habit replacement?

**Regardless. I do not meddle in the affairs of mortals, no matter how… ambitious.**

“Oh, gimme a break,” huffed Bill, rolling his eye. “C’mon, live a little! Use your UNFATHOMABLE COSMIC JIBBER-JABBER and get them off my ass. You’ve got”—he _felt _his expression sour, and had to concentrate to dial it back—“_sliiightly _more power than dear ol’ me at the moment, so heck, why not? A few words and they’ll be out of your illustrious gills for the rest of time. AND THEN SOME!” He shot Axolotl a glittering grin. “Consider it an investment.”

Axolotl looked at him with something dangerously close to pity in its bottomless black eyes. **Not all of us want to be you, Cipher, **it said, voice resonant and deep as the mountain pool it had dragged itself out of—a bizarrely rich sound coming from such an amphibian shorter than his forearm. **_You _don’t even want to be yourself. **

Bill curled his upper lip. “Yeah, yeah, sure. What happened to having a conversation like two MATURE, NON-PSYCHOANALYTICAL cosmic entities? Hey, let’s go back to talking about my impending destruction! I miss that.”

But Axolotl was already turning around. **Good luck, Cipher, **it said over its shoulder as it slipped off its rock. **I’ve already given you all the help I can, and more than you deserve.**

Bill’s eye widened, and he lunged forward. “Wait—!”

Too late: Axolotl’s form became a calamine-pink ripple as it slipped under the dark, fast-flowing water of the river. It vanished from sight entirely as the current washed it downstream, and Bill was left standing at a mountain spring, alone.

The manacle hummed in his ears.

This time, he didn’t bother yelling at it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, WRITING BILL'S DIALOGUE, discovering that HIGHLIGHTING A SECTION OF TEXT while holding shift and f3 CAPITALIZES IT: this changes the fucking game
> 
> also, this is the jumping-off point of the bill whump. it only took me almost sixty thousand words (!!) to get here, but it’s all downhill for him from here
> 
> ([my tumblr!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/goldilocked))


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